ABSTRACT
Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) occurs with great simplicity for high power laser radiation in either a bulk or a waveguide geometry. Under a large range of conditions, both focused or waveguided, the backscattered Stokes wave is found to be predominantly the phase conjugate (wavefront reversed) spatial distribution of the incident light. Unfortunately, the need for threshold requires high input intensity, and for high conversion even higher intensities are desirable. The high intensity requirement limits the practical cases when the SBS process can be used. An additional issue is that the scattered wave is derived from the incident wave energy and the SBS process necessarily is limited to reflectivity less than unity.
