Five-wave mixing in molecular fluids

The theory of a novel five-wave mixing process is developed for application to liquids and solutions. In its simplest implementation a sum-frequency Signal is generated in a process which also accommodates features of optical phase conjugation. The flexibility in the beam geometry affords considerable scope for the study of the polarization and angular dependence. Together with the extensive possibilities for frequency tuning (and incidental exploitation of resonance features) the process proves to be powerfully dependent on molecular symmetry, and it lends itself to a very complete characterization of fourth-order optical nonlinearity.