Abstract

The thermal erasure decay at different temperatures of holographic gratings thermally fixed in iron-doped lithium niobate has been exhaustively studied. An activation energy of 0.94 eV was found to be independent of the grating fringe spacing. At a given temperature the decay time is strongly dependent on the grating spacing. This dependence is well fitted to a square fringe spacing law, as predicted theoretically. From the experimental data the room-temperature hologram lifetime under illumination is extrapolated, giving as a result $\tau \left(\mathrm{years}\right)=\left(5.2\pm 0.2\right){\mathrm{\Lambda }}^2$, with the grating spacing $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ in micrometers.

© 1998 Optical Society of America

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