A quality of parametric wave phase conjugation of ultrasound

The criterion, known from optics, of wave phase conjugation quality is accommodated for acoustical experiment. An incident focused sound beam at 5 MHz is propagated towards a supercritical magnetoelastic conjugator through an introduced random phase layer, and the conjugate beam propagates backwards through the layer to the source. 1D and 2D distributions of wave field are measured for the conjugate beam of finite amplitude using a membrane hydrophone. The maximum sound intensity of 640 W/cm 2 and acoustic power of 4 W are registered in the focal maximum of the conjugate wave. The quality of WPC is calculated from the ratio between the power in the central maximum and the total power of the conjugate beam. The method is applied to compare two operation modes of a supercritical parametric conjugator. It is shown that in the linear mode the conjugator provides higher quality than in the nonlinear (0.54 compared to 0.24).