Strong lowering of the mirrorless optical oscillation threshold by angular mismatches for nonlocal photorefractive...

We show that the introduction of an angular mismatch for the pump waves results, in the case of nonlocal photorefractive nonlinearity, in a strong almost twofold decrease of the threshold value of the coupling strength for the mirrorless optical oscillation. This surprising feature will lead to a strong modification of the threshold and near-threshold behavior of a vast variety of optical oscillators based on the photorefractive phase conjugation and involving finite-size light beams.