Theory of optical phase conjugation in disordered media: Coherent properties of the backscattered field.

Abstract

Recently it was shown that in disordered media, nonlinear backscattering of phase-conjugated signal light is possible in the presence of only a single pump wave, in contrast to the case of an ordered medium where two counterpropagating pump waves are necessary. Formally, this disorder-induced nonlinear process corresponds to the cooperon-channel (back)scattering of the signal wave in the presence of diffusion propagation of the pump wave. (The cooperon is the Cooper particle-particle diffusion propagator.) In this contribution, the question is considered whether the disorder-induced backscattering of phase-conjugated light can restore the disturbed signal wave front as it does in the ordered case. Examining correlations of the outgoing waves corresponding to different incoming signal waves, it is shown that the backscattered waves possess a ``phase memory'' even for a large difference of the angles of incidence of incoming waves. This is in contrast to the case of linear backscattering, where such correlations take place only at a very small difference of the angles of incidence (of the order of backscattering peak width). Thus the phase conjugation in disordered media does possess the peculiar coherent properties of that in ordered media.