Coupling pulsed dye oscillators using a phase conjugate resonator

Four pulsed dye oscillators are coherently combined into a single phase conjugate resonator through the selfpumped conjugation process in a single crystal of BaTiO(3). We have measured the locking range and energy scaling behavior of the system. The locking range is of the order of hundreds of wavelengths. Our best results are close to the theoretical limit and show that one can obtain output energy approximately proportional to N, the number of dye gain cells. Since the N output beams are locked in phase, this implies that the peak far-field intensity would scale as N(2). We also report two properties of the photorefractive phase conjugate mirror that are relevant to such a system: the fluence required for start-up (9 J/cm(2)) and the field of view (0.0 sr).