Let us then assume an incident probe field propagating in the perpendicular direction, as described by
where
(See
Figure 1). If we ignore nonlinear dispersion corrections due to the light spring, we can write
. Our aim is to calculate the field scattered by the rotating nonlinear structure described by the field
, defined in eq. (
1). The total field of our problem can therefore be written as
where
and
are the probe fields, and
and
are the second order scattered fields. Notice that the magnetic field associated with the light spring is given by
where
In the particular case of
mentioned earlier, and assuming that the two light spring components are linearly polarized at an angle
relative the the
x axis, we get
According to equations (
10) and (
13), the wave equation for the scattered radiation is given by
where the source terms are independent of the second order fields, and therefore
and
. In order to calculate these terms, we start with the invariantes (
8). They can be approximately written as
and
with the phase
In these expressions we have used the equality
. We also assumed that
, which corresponds to neglecting the second term in eq. (
15). This term would lead to corrections of order
, assumed much smaller than one, where
w is the beam waist. Notice that, in the above expressions, the other neglected contributions are second order corrections to the dispersion relation of the scattered field. These simplifying assumptions don’t significantly contribute to the final result.
The above invariants can be used to calculate the quantities
an
, where only terms of the form
contribute to the scattered radiation, for frequencies determined by
, as shown next. We first write the nonlinear polarization
, and magnetization
as
After a straightforward calculation, we obtain
and
where we have used the auxiliary phase functions
and the auxiliary polarization and magnetization vectors
and
The unit vectors
and
, with appropriate subscripts, were also used. Of particular interest is the case considered here, where the two components of the light spring propagate along the
z-axis, with
, and the probe propagates along the
x-axis, in the negative direction, with
. To simplify, we also use
. In this case, we can write the auxiliary polarization vectors in a much simpler form, as
This allows us to write the nonlinear current as
, where the first term corresponds to
. It only contributes to elastic scattering, because it evolves in space and time according to the phase
, and will be ignored in the subsequent discussion. As for the other term, we have
where
determines the radial structure,
are the emitted frequencies, and the phase functions become
with
. Finally, we have used the auxiliary current vector
where
is defined below,
and
. Similarly, for the nonlinear magnetization we have
, where the terms contributing to inelastic scattering are
with
and
is obtained by interchanging the subscripts 1 and 2. Notice that the quantities
and
only give negligible nonlinear corrections to the refractive index of the incident wave at frequency
. Although they are not explicitly written, because not relevant to scattering, they are of the same order of magnitude as
and
.