Abstract

Real time holography in photorefractive materials has been considered for many applications, most recently to provide the reconfigurable interconnections in optical neural net computing.¹ In these applications the existing holographic grating pattern must be erased and a new pattern written within the cycle time of the computer. The usual procedure for erasure is to flood the crystal with a separate erase beam or to use one of the write beams alone as the erase beam. We present a simple technique for rapid erasure by shifting the phase of one of the write beams by λ/2. This technique gives an almost complete erasure and is at least 8 times faster than using one of the write beams alone to erase.

© 1987 Optical Society of America