Grating cavity dual wavelength dye laser.

We report simultaneous dual wavelength dye laser emission using Littman-Metcalf and Littrow cavity configurations with minimum cavity elements. Dual wavelength operation is obtained by laser operation in two optical paths inside the cavity, one of which uses reflection in the circulating dye cell. Styryl 14 laser dye operating in the 910 nm to 960 nm was used in a 15%:85% PC/EG solvent green pumped with a Q-switched doubled Nd3+:YAG laser.

Self-healing property of a caustic optical beam.

It is well known that Bessel beams and the other families of propagation-invariant optical fields have the property of self-healing when obstructed by an opaque object. Here it is shown that there exists another kind of field distribution that can have an analog property. In particular, we demonstrate that a class of caustic wave fields, whose transverse intensity patterns change on propagation, when perturbed by an opaque object can reappear at a further plane as if they had not been obstructed.

Influence of the photoinduced focal length of a thin nonlinear material in the Z-scan technique.

In this paper the response purely refractive of a thin nonlinear material, in the z-scan technique experiment, is modeled as a lens with a focal length that is a function of some integer power of the incident beam radius. We demonstrate that different functional dependences of the photoinduced lens of a thin nonlinear material give typical z-scan curves with special features. The analysis is based on the propagation of Gaussian beams in the approximation of thin lens and small distortion for the nonlinear sample.

Oblique interaction of spatial dark-soliton stripes in nonlocal media.

We report what we believe to be the first experimental observation of a large spatial lateral shift in the interaction of obliquely oriented spatial dark-soliton stripes. We demonstrate by numerical simulations that this new effect can be attributed to the specific features of optical media with a nonlocal nonlinear response.