I studied the nonlinear optical properties of cesium vapors using degenerate four-wave mixing in the phase-conjugating configuration and their potential use in image processing. In particular, I investigated the nonlinear response of cesium vapors in thin cells of 10 ;In a comparison with other nonlinear materials, cesium vapors have the best figure-of-merit for image processing in terms of nonlinearities, response time and the minimum resolvable feature size. We further implemented a 1mm-thick cesium cell in an optical joint transform correlator using only several mW/cm... |