Günter P., Huignard J.-P. (Eds.) Photorefractive Materials and Their Applications 1: Basic Effects

Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, Inc., 2006. – 430 p. – ISBN10: 0-387-25191-XThis is the first volume of a set of three within the Springer Series in Optical Sciences, and is devoted to photorefractive effects, photorefractive materials, and their applications. Since the publication of our first two Springer books on Photorefractive Materials and Their Applications (Topics in Applied Physics, Vols. 61 and 62) almost 20 years ago, a lot of research has been done in this area. New and often expected effects have been discovered, theoretical models developed, known effects finally explained, and novel applications proposed. We believe that the field has now reached a high level of maturity, even if research continues in all areas mentioned above and with new discoveries arriving quite regularly.
This first volume is devoted to the description of the basic effects leading to photoinduced refractive index changes in electro-optical materials. As is commonly known, this photorefractive effect was originally discovered as undesirable optical damage in nonlinear and electro-optical crystals. Light- induced changes of the refractive index limited the usefulness of crystals such as LiNbO₃ with large electro-optic and nonlinear optical coefficients, because the index changes give rise to decollimation and scattering of laser beams in devices such as modulators and frequency doublers. Subsequently, materials exhibiting such an optical damage effect—later called the photorefractive effect—were proposed as holographic materials and when faster recording materials became available as dynamic holographic materials used for beam amplification, realtime interferometry, optical phase conjugation, and image processing applications. This class of photoinduced mechanisms has contributed to establish the link between the fields of nonlinear optics and coherent Fourier optics.Light-Induced Dynamic Gratings and Photorefraction
Fundamentals of Photorefractive Phenomena
Space-Charge Driven Holograms in Anisotropic Media
Space-Charge Wave Effects in Photorefractive Materials
Feedback-Controlled Photorefractive Beam Coupling
Band-to-Band Photorefraction
Two-Step Recording in Photorefractive Crystals
Spatio-Temporal Instabilities and Self-Organization
Photorefractive Waveguides
Photorefractive Solitons
Thermal Fixing of Photoinduced Gratings
Electrical Fixing of Photoinduced Gratings