Investigation of phase shift of holographic gratings in photorefractive materials

Abstract

The fundamental processes occurring during the writing of phase gratings in photorefractive materials have been studied extensively in the past 1,2. Due to different mechanisms of carrier transportation these holograms may be phase shifted with respect to the interference pattern. This phase shift is of fundamental significance for the understanding of the mechanism of the photorefractive effect and for applications. We present a novel method for measuring the phase shift and some experimental results.