MANIPULATING THE INFORMATION CARRIED BY AN OPTICAL BEAM WITH REFLEXIVE PHOTOREFRACTIVE BEAM COUPLING

A two-beam coupling interaction of an information-bearing beam with a copy of itself in a photorefractive medium changes the spatiotemporal nature of the beam. We analyze the reflexive coupling of an informatio n-bearing beam carrying two or more spatiotemporal signals, using a on e-dimensional model. We find that the statistical information content of the beam can be increased or decreased by use of reflexive coupling . In particular, we show that the reflexive interaction can be used to selectively enhance a given signal over others on the basis of intens ity and that, for example, a pair of spatially overlapping but tempora lly independent signals can be made spatially orthogonal.