Abstract

The constraints of crystal symmetries in photorefractive media necessitate a general vector treatment of light scattering to explain fully the qualities of observed photorefractive effects. Commonly used photorefractive crystals¹ are generally anisotropic (as is evident from their natural birefringence and electrooptic properties). Previous treatments of wave coupling phenomena in these materials have included the imposition of vector properties (by consideration of special cases of input beam polarization states and crystal orientations) on results from essentially scalar coupled wave theories. We report an approach to the beam coupling problem in which no such scalar field approximations are made. This work has revealed new results, supported by experiment, which do not arise from previous less general analyses.

© 1985 Optical Society of America