Achieving enhanced gain in photorefractive polymers by eliminating electron contributions using large bias fields

Diffraction response of photorefractive polymers over nine orders of magnitude of pulse duration

The development of a single mode fiber-based pulsed laser with variable pulse duration, energy, and repetition rate has enabled the characterization of photorefractive polymer (PRP) in a previously inaccessible regime located between millisecond and microsecond single pulse illumination. With the addition of CW and nanosecond pulse lasers, four wave mixing measurements covering 9 orders of magnitudes in pulse duration are reported. Reciprocity failure of the diffraction efficiency according to the pulse duration for a constant energy density is observed and attributed to multiple excitation, transport and trapping events of the charge carriers. However, for pulses shorter than 30 μs, the efficiency reaches a plateau where an increase in energy density no longer affects the efficiency. This plateau is due to the saturation of the charge generation at high peak power given the limited number of sensitizer sites. The same behavior is observed in two different types of devices composed of the same material but with or without a buffer layer covering one electrode, which confirm the origin of these mechanisms. This new type of measurement is especially important to optimize PRP for applications using short pulse duration.

Photorefractive two-beam coupling joint transform correlator: modeling and performance evaluation

The photorefractive two-beam coupling joint transform correlator combines two features. The first is embedded semi-adaptive optimality, which weighs the correlation against clutter and noise in the input, and the second is the intrinsic dynamic range compression nonlinearity, which improves several metrics simultaneously without metric trade-off. Although the two beam coupling correlator was invented many years ago, its outstanding performance was recognized on only relatively simple images. There was no study about the performance of this correlator on complicated images and using different figures of merit. In this paper, the study is extended to more complicated images. For the first time, to our knowledge, we demonstrate simultaneous improvement in metrics performance without metric trade-off. The performance was evaluated compared to the classical joint transform correlator. A typical experimental result to validate the simulation results was also shown in this work. The best performing operation parameters were identified to guide the experimental work and for future comparison with other well-known optimal correlation filters.