Controlling cascade dressing interaction of four-wave mixing image.

We report our observations on enhancement and suppression of spatial four-wave mixing (FWM) images and the interplay of four coexisting FWM processes in a two-level atomic system associating with three-level atomic system as comparison. The phenomenon of spatial splitting of the FWM signal has been observed in both x and y directions. Such FWM spatial splitting is induced by the enhanced cross-Kerr nonlinearity due to atomic coherence. The intensity of the spatial FWM signal can be controlled by an additional dressing field. Studies on such controllable beam splitting can be very useful in understanding spatial soliton formation and interactions, and in applications of spatial signal processing.