Manley-Rowe relations 2026-10-20
Conservation relations for resonant, lossless wave mixing. For sum-frequency generation with , the intensities obey . Thus and are constant. Their difference gives a third, dependent invariant. Adding the intensity derivatives yields conservation of energy.
The exchange interpretation divides each intensity by its photon energy . One conversion removes a photon from each lower-frequency mode and adds one to the upper mode. For classical coupled-wave equations, differentiating the squared complex amplitudes gives the same common exchange rate multiplied by . Loss or externally replenished pumps require corresponding source terms.
The distance over which a constant phase mismatch accumulates phase difference . In unseeded, undepleted sum-frequency generation, the generated intensity first reaches a maximum at this length and returns to zero at . This length concerns relative phases of interacting waves, rather than the temporal optical coherence length of one source.
The process is sum-frequency generation, with . The same reversible three-wave mixing interaction permits the reverse conversion when the higher-frequency field supplies the pump. The second-order nonlinear polarization couples the three waves; its effective coefficient includes the crystal orientation and polarizations.
One efficiency limit is phase mismatch: contributions generated at different positions acquire different phases and can cancel. A second practical limit is spatial walk-off, which reduces the overlap of finite beams in a birefringent crystal. A beam radius and relative walk-off angle give an overlap length of order . Absorption and scattering provide further losses. Group-velocity mismatch matters for pulses, and pump depletion eventually invalidates an undepleted-pump calculation; none of these effects should be silently included in the ideal lossless plane-wave equations.
Define and hold constant. Direct integration of the driven equation gives
where . The second expression has a continuous phase-matched limit. If the generated field is initially absent,
For this is proportional to : the first maximum is at the nonlinear optical coherence length , and the first subsequent zero is at . A seed adds interference with the generated amplitude and can change that pattern. At exact phase matching, the unseeded result grows as only while pump depletion remains negligible.
Figure 1.
Unseeded sum-frequency intensity with nonzero phase mismatch and undepleted pumps
. Original ideal-model calculation normalized to its first maximum. The crystal length is chosen as four coherence lengths; no measured conversion efficiency is implied. Details.
To retain depletion consistently, differentiate each intensity before inserting the coupled equations:
For real in the lossless convention, put . The result is
The signs follow the printed amplitude equations. In initial up-conversion, the newly generated makes , so the two input intensities decrease while the sum-frequency intensity increases. Adding the derivatives gives zero because . The total intensity is conserved, even though the three individual intensities change.
The Manley-Rowe relations are
Dividing an intensity by gives photon flux density. A conversion event removes one photon from each lower-frequency mode and adds one to the upper mode, or does the reverse. Therefore and count conserved sums of photon fluxes, while counts the conserved lower-frequency difference. They are not three independent invariants: . Energy conservation is also recovered as .
The unweighted combinations generally fail because the exchanged photons have different energies. Explicitly,
The qualification “generally” matters: is conserved for equal lower frequencies in a distinct-mode degenerate case, and every derivative vanishes when there is no exchange. The equations establish nonconservation for generic unequal-frequency interaction, not for all special solutions.
Phase mismatch 2026-10-20
The residual wave vector difference in a wave-conversion process. For collinear sum-frequency generation, choose . Contributions separated by then differ by wave phase . At phase matching this residual is zero. The sign convention changes some amplitude phases but not the unseeded conversion factor .
Three-wave mixing 2026-10-20
An interaction among three waves mediated by a second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility. In sum-frequency generation, two input angular frequencies satisfy . The same coupling permits reverse conversion. Phase matching determines whether successive generated contributions reinforce; the Manley-Rowe relations express the associated lossless exchange constraints.