Advances in Photorefractive Polymers: High Efficiency, Improved Speed, and Net Two-Beam Coupling Gain

Abstract

Polymers exhibiting the photorefractive (PR) effect have attracted attention lately because this new class of photorefractive materials1 has the potential for improvements in photorefractive figures of merit due to the low dielectric constant of these materials. PR polymers also possess other advantages over inorganic materials, such as compositional flexibility and ease of sample preparation and processability. As usual, in addition to photoconductivity, optical nonlinearity, and four-wavc-mixing (FWM) measurements of holographic diffraction efficiency, we routinely perform two-beam coupling (TBC) measurements to observe the non-zero phase-shift characteristic of the photorefractive effect in order to obtain unequivocal proof of photorefractivity as the source for the observed gratings. © 1993 Optical Society of America