Photorefractive ring resonator with seeding as an externally driven oscillator

Abstract

We report on experimental and theoretical studies of a photorefractive ring resonator pumped by a 1.06 µm beam and injected with a weak, external, seeding beam. The competition between the two dominant gratings that form inside the photorefractive crystal leads to characteristic periodic oscillations in the intensity of the resonating beam, which originate from the frequency difference between the pump beam and the unidirectional oscillation beam. We show that such a system can be treated as a driven nonlinear oscillator