Relaxation Oscillations in Stimulated Ruman and Brillouin Scattering

The equations describing the transfer of intensity from a pump beam simultaneously to forward and backward stimulated scattered beams in an infinite medium are shown to lead to pulsations similar to relaxation oscillations in the scattered intensities. The period of the pulsations is simply related to the gain length for the forward-scattered beam, and may be much longer than the ordinary transient time (related to the damping of material excitations) usually associated with stimulated scattering. Similar oscillations occur for backward scattering alone (stimulated Brillouin scattering) if the scattering medium is finite. In this case the period equals the photon round-trip time in the medium if the latter exceeds the backward gain length. Both phenomena should be observable in scattering from gases such as N₂ and H₂ at high pressure, and may also play a role in determining the temporal structure of light scattered from the region of a self-focus in liquids.