New highly efficient photorefractive polymer composite for optical-storage and image-processing applications

Abstract

Reversible holographic storage and beam amplification has been achieved in a new polymer composite using a low-power semiconductor visible laser diode emitting at 674nm. This material shows substantially better performance than the existing photorefractive polymeric materials. A diffraction efficiency of 5%, a gain coefficient of 30cm−1 and a net gain of 6cm−1 have been measured in 105 μm-thick samples with an applied field of 40V/μm.