Very high-gain two-wave mixing in BaTiO_3 with a self-bent pump beam

Abstract

We propose a two-wave mixing interaction between a self-bent pump beam and a signal beam in a BaTiO3 crystal. This new configuration exhibits two-wave mixing gain values as high as Gsat = 1.5 × 105, corresponding to an enhancement of 40× in comparison with a conventional two-wave mixing geometry. Application to coherent image amplification with such a high gain combined with a very good signal-to-noise ratio is demonstrated.