Compression of pulses during their amplification in the field of a focused counterpropagating pump pulse of the same frequency and width in media with electrostriction nonlinearity

Efficient compression of focused ∼0.9-ns pulses of a miniature Nd:YAG laser to less than 60 ps is experimentally obtained at their interaction with counterpropagating pulses of the same carrier frequency and width in CCl4. In this case, electrostriction interaction (amplification) begins not from the level of spontaneous-scattering noise; therefore, the counterpropagating pulses can be compressed at pump pulse energies below the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold energies. When counterpropagating seed pulses are used, the energy and temporal stability of compressed pulses are several times higher, and their time jitter is smaller than that for SBS compression from the level of spontaneous-scattering noise. (nonlinear optical phenomena)