Phase conjugation upon SBS of a focused laser speckle beam

The phase conjugation (PC) of a focused Gaussian laser beam with a partial spatial coherence of the wave front is studied numerically and theoretically upon SBS within the framework of a three-dimensional nonstationary SBS model, which takes into account transient processes and SBS saturation. The dependences of the PC coefficient h on the laser radiation power are obtained for different excesses of the angular divergence over the diffraction limit ξ. It is found that for the given reflectance of laser radiation from the SBS mirror, the PC coefficient monotonically decreases with increasing the divergence. For example, under the near threshold SBS conditions, h decreases from 70% to 30%, when ξ increases from 1 to 10. For the given divergence, the PC coefficient increases with increasing the reflectance and approaches the ideal one (h > 90%) upon deep SBS saturation, when the reflectance exceeds 90%—95%.