Nonlinear Volume Holography for Wave-Front Engineering

The concept of volume holography is applied to the design of an optical superlattice for the nonlinear harmonic generation. The generated harmonic wave can be considered as a holographic image caused by the incident fundamental wave. Compared with the conventional quasi-phase-matching method, this new method has significant advantages when applied to complicated nonlinear processes such as the nonlinear generation of special beams. As an example, we experimentally realized a second-harmonic Airy beam, and the results are found to agree well with numerical simulations.

Figure 1

Schematics of (a) the storing and (b) reconstruction processes in nonlinear volume holography.

Figure 2

(a) Numerical simulation of a propagation nonlinear Airy beam. (b) Calculated and (c) optical microscopic images of OSL.

Figure 3

(a) Experimental setup for the generation of the nonlinear Airy beam. The imaging system is moving along the $x$ axis during the measurement. (b) Transverse patterns of the generated Airy beam and (c) the self-healing property of the nonlinear Airy beam.

Figure 4

Transverse patterns showing (a) temperature selectivity and (b) angular selectivity of the nonlinear volume holography.