Photorefractive Materials and Holographic Memories

Abstract

Photorefractive materials have many potential photonic applications, including holographic optical data storage and real time image processing. Recently, the photorefractive polymers has emerged, offering wide structural flexibility, easy processability, and low cost. The requirement for photorefractivity are charge generation, transport and trapping and the electro-optic effect.
Charge generation and transport phenomena has been studied eagerly because of their practical importance in electrophotography. These have resulted in a considerable level of fundamental understanding of the relationship between the structure of these materials and the electronic properties. This understanding will lead to the development of many new and improved materials for photorefractive polymers. The purpose of this paper is to review the organic photorefractive materials and their application for holographic memory. Firstly, the mechanism of formation of the internal field by carrier transport is described. Then, no applied field writing to photorefractive materials is discussed. The following section describes the electro-optic effect in organic materials. Finally, the application for photorefractive memory and the measurement method of photorefractive effect are described.