Abstract

Two wave mixing can be used (1) to write volume phase holograms and therefore, store information in photorefractive materials such as LiNbO₃. However, the written holographic gratings suffer from light-induced erasure leading to loss of stored information during read-out. To avoid unwanted optical erasure, one possibility is to stabilize the grating by thermal fixing, which has been investigated in detail for LiNbO₃ (2–3). More recently, thermal fixing in other materials is being studied (4), although the physical mechanism are less understood.

© 1990 Optical Society of America