Making of a nonlinear optical cavity

In the article we explain in detail how to build a photorefractive oscillator (PRO), which is a laser-pumped nonlinear optical cavity containing a photorefractive crystal. The specific PRO whose construction we describe systematically, is based on a Fabry-Perot optical cavity working in a non-degenerate four wave-mixing configuration. This particular PRO has the property that the generated beam exhibits laser-like phase invariance and, as an application, we show how a suitably modulated injected beam converts the output field from phase-invariant into phase-bistable. While the emphasis is made on the making of the experimental device and on the way measurements are implemented, some introduction to the photorefractive effect as well as to the necessary concepts of nonlinear dynamics are also given, so that the article is reasonably self-contained.