Characteristics and applications of self-diffraction of light waves with noncollinear polarizations

An analysis is made of some characteristics of the transient self-diffraction of two waves with different polarizations in an isotropic medium with a scalar response. It is demonstrated that this may be used as the basis of a polarization switch that can not only switch but also amplify a signal wave. A method of measuring the degree of temporal coherence of optical beams, including those with a well-developed transient speckle structure, was proposed and implemented experimentally.