Abstract
Photorefractive materials have many potential photonic applications, including dynamic holographic storage and image processing. Recently, the new class of amorphous organic photorefractive materials has emerged, offering wide structural flexibility, easy processability, and low cost at very high performance levels. Progress in this field has led to absorption-limited complete diffraction for the readout of a hologram stored in materials of only 100-150 μm thickness and to extremely large net gain coefficients of more than 200 cm−1 compared to 40-50 cm−1 in the best inorganic photorefractive crystals known to date. These excellent properties occur in materials with low glass transition temperatures and result from refractive index modulations as large as Δn ≈ 10-2, mostly originating from a Kerr-type orientational birefringence rather than the electro-optic effect as in traditional photorefractive crystals. The materials can be adjusted for photorefractivity over the entire visible spectrum and in the near infrared. The sensitivity is excellent enabling the use of low-power laser sources, such as HeNe laser or laser diodes.
© 1997 Optical Society of America
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