Experimental demonstration of bistable phase locking in a photorefractive oscillator

We report experimental evidence of bistable phase locking in nonlinear optics, in particular, in a photorefractive oscillator emitting in few transverse modes. Bistable phase locking is a recently proposed method for converting a laserlike system, which is phase invariant, into a phase-bistable one by injecting a suitable spatially modulated monochromatic beam, resonant with the laser emission, into the optical cavity. We experimentally demonstrate that the emission on the fundamental TEM00 mode becomes phase bistable by injection of a beam with the shape of the TEM10 mode with appropriate frequency, in accordance with recent theoretical predictions [K. Staliunas et al., Phys. Rev. A 80, 025801 (2009)]. The experimental observations are supported by an analytical study of a few-transverse-mode photorefractive oscillator model