title: Beam cleanup and image restoration with a photorefractive polymeric composite.
abstract: We demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, the use of a photorefractive polymeric composite to clean a phase-distorted laser beam and reconstruct a badly distorted image. Advantageous qualities including relatively high figures of merit, ease of processability, and low cost make this class of materials attractive when compared with their inorganic crystalline counterparts. In addition, we used four-wave-mixing and holographic techniques to obtain an internal diffraction efficiency of approximately 31% at 54.5 V/micron and a two-beam-coupling gain coefficient of gamma = 17 cm-1 at 54.5 V/micron under our experimental conditions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Laser and Optics Research Center, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado 80840-6299, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Winiarz
authors.forename: Fassil
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ghebremichael