Spontaneous pattern formation in a cavity with incoherent light.

SPATIAL PATTERNS IN NONLINEAR OPTICS Pattern Formation in Optical Cavities With Incoherent Light

terns of this non-resonant system exhibit spatial line narrowing with the increase of feedback, resembling the line narrowing in (resonant) lasers (see Fig. 1). In fact, despite the incoherence of the light, this cavity threshold is analogous to many thresholds in resonant feedback systems with gain.1 In a subsequent paper, we theoretically analyzed a cavity in which the light was also spatiall...

Cavity pattern formation with incoherent light.

We study the propagation dynamics of an incoherent light beam circulating in a passive cavity containing noninstantaneous nonlinear media. It is shown that patterns form in this cavity in spite of spatial incoherence of the light. We show that the pattern formation process is always associated with two consecutive thresholds. The first (instability) threshold is unaffected by the cavity boundar...

Spontaneous pattern formation with incoherent white light.

We present the first experimental observation of modulation instability and spontaneous pattern formation with incoherent white light emitted from an incandescent light bulb. We show experimentally that modulation instability of white light propagating in a noninstantaneous self-focusing medium is a collective effect, where the entire temporal spectrum of the light beam becomes unstable at the ...

Pattern formation in a ring cavity with temporally incoherent feedback

We present a theoretical and experimental study of modulation instability and pattern formation in a passive nonlinear optical cavity that is longer than the coherence length of the light circulating in it. Pattern formation in this cavity exhibits various features of a second-order phase transition, closely resembling laser action. © 2004 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 190.3100, 190.4420.

Modulation Instability of Spatially-Incoherent Light Beams and Pattern Formation in Incoherent Wave Systems