Abstract

We report the first measurements on spatial harmonics of a photorefractive grating. Our method was to create a photorefractive grating with 2 crossed 515 nm plane waves such that the grating wavevector was parallel to the c-axis of a BaTiO₃ crystal. We measured the amplitudes of the fundamental and first and second spatial harmonics of the resulting photorefractive grating by measuring the strength of the Bragg scattering of a 633 nm laser from them. We performed these measurements for various values of the grating period ℓ_g, and as a funciton of the intensity ratio of the two "writing" 515 nm beams. We performed numerical solutions of the model of Kukhtarev¹ for these parameters and found excellent agreement with our data.

© 1987 Optical Society of America