Observation and Study of the Photorefractive Effect in Doped Nonlinear Polymers

Abstract

Many applications of photorefractivity have been proposed: a virtually unlimited array of image processing techniques including phase conjugation and novelty filtering, simulations of neural networks and associative memories, and high density efficient holographic optical storage. Until very recently, all materials showing the photorefractive effect have been inorganic crystals1. A problem currently impeding the wide-spread exploitation of the photorefractive effect has been the fact that inorganic materials exhibiting the effect tend to be difficult and thus expensive to prepare and, because of their crystalline nature, to be incompatible with current integrated packaging processes. There is thus a continuing and critical need for new classes of photorefractive materials with improved processability and performance.