Degenerate four-wave mixing in semiconductor-doped glasses

We report degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) of visible radiation in borosilicate glasses doped with crystallites of the mixed semiconductor CdSxSe1−x. These semiconductor-doped glasses—available commercially in the form of colored glass filters—exhibit third-order nonlinearities of ~10−9–10−8 esu for DFWM with short (~10-nsec) laser pulses at various visible wavelengths. Our studies on the temporal decay of the transient gratings indicate that the nonlinearity is not thermal in origin but may be attributed to the generation of a short-lived electron–hole plasma. In contrast with DFWM experiments in other semiconductors invoking gratings of optically generated carriers (or other mobile particles), we report unique diffusion-independent decay of the gratings in these glasses; this is deduced from the dependence of the intensity and polarization of the DFWM signal on the polarization combinations of the input beams. Finally, we report detailed data on the aberration-correction properties of these isotropic glasses.