Abstract

Holography, two-wave mixing, and four-wave mixing based upon the photorefractive effect provide massive parallelism for optical signal processing. However, large photorefractive crystals are generally difficult to grow and may be expensive. Our motivation to pursue the fiber geometry of photorefractive crystals is threefold: saving of crystal volume, high optical energy density, and long interaction length, which bring about a number of advantages over bulk crystal so that holographic memory capacity is enhanced by squeezing images into a fiber, and both lowering of operational power and speed-up of two- and four-wave mixing are achieved. However, few photorefractive crystal fibers have so far been fabricated.^1,2

© 1992 Optical Society of America