Saturation Effects in Stimulated Rayleigh-Wing Scattering

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Abstract
The phenomenon of stimulated Rayleigh-wing scattering in anisotropic molecular liquids is analyzed. Representative combinations of polarization for the incident and scattered light are considered. It is shown that in regions where the focused laser beam is intense, saturation occurs in the molecular response to external optical fields, in that perfect alignment of the individual liquid molecules in the optical fields is approached. Accordingly, the nonlinear amplification associated with the stimulated radiation is reduced. The results of the analysis qualitatively explain several important recent observations which are in conflict with previous theroretical predictions. For example, it is shown that the nonlinear gain is considerably greater when the incident light is circularly polarized (the stimulated radiation being circularly polarized in the reverse sense) than it is when the incident light is linearly polarized. Despite saturation, sufficient amplification exists in the former case to allow the efficient conversion of incident to stimulated Rayleigh light at moderate power levels.