Optical switching using photoinduced holographic gratings

Abstract

The development of optical communication requires a broadband bidimensional optical switching system. For this purpose, the authors describe the beam steering properties of phase volume gratings obtained by holographic techniques. The photosensitive medium is the photorefractive BSO crystal which allows the recording erasure and storage of phase volume gratings. They present an original recording method using two collinear beams at different wavelengths. The proposed technique would permit the beam addressing process to be simplified because the diffracted beam is collinear to the writing-beam directions.