Recent Advances in High Gain Photorefractive Polymers

Abstract

With the discovery of photorefractivity in inorganic crystals in the late sixties [1,2], it was soon realized that the photorefractive (PR) effect had a large potential within the field of nonlinear optics. The versatility of the effect has since been clearly demonstrated by numerous applications ranging from holographic data storage and image processing to Bragg interference filters, optical interconnects, optical tracking systems, and self-pumped phase conjugate mirrors [3]. The class of photoconductive, electrooptic crystals that exhibited the PR effect quickly expanded to include ferroelectric oxides (BaTiO3, LiNbO3), sillenites (Bi12SiO20, Bi12TiO20, Bi12GeO20) and compound semiconductors (GaAs, InP, CdTe), to mention just a few. Recently completely new classes of materials have been proposed based on polymeric materials, organic glasses, and liquid crystals [4-6]. With the advantage of ease of processing, low cost, and high performance, these materials promise to be good candidates for present and future applications.