There is a great interest in the study of nonlinear properties of ion doped materials due to their implications in laser behavior and, more recently, their applications as phase conjugation laser systems. Although many experiments were performed in these materials, in most of them the nonlinearity was studied by populating the ion metastable state through the excitation of higher energy absorption band which nonradiatively decay to the metastable state. For instance, in ruby several different techniques were used in nonlinear refractive index, n2, quantitative measurements but always using an Ar+ laser to pump the 4T2 absorption band which decays to the 2E metastable state. The purpose of this work is to study n2 nonlinear spectroscopy in resonance with ruby and alexandrite laser R lines.
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