Reconstruction of parasitic holograms to characterize photorefractive materials

Photoinduced light scattering is a serious drawback that limits the applicability of thick holographic recording media but provides valuable information on the recording medium. As long as there is no correlation between the scattering centers in the crystal, photoinduced light scattering may be explained to result from the interference pattern of the incident beam and the field scattered from a single point-like scattering center. The hologram of this ellipsoidally scattered wave field will have practically the same structure in the reciprocal space modified by a response function which reflects the anisotropic properties of the recording medium. We studied photoinduced light scattering in LiNbO₃:Fe, a model system for photorefractive materials. The transmitted intensity in the stationary state of the scattering process is investigated as a function of the reconstruction angle at different wavelengths and polarizations of the reconstructing beam. The experimental results are analyzed by a simple phenomenological model based on the Ewald construction and can be used to choose suitable conditions at which holographic scattering can be minimized as well as to extract some physical parameters of the crystal. Received: 27 September 2000 / Revised version: 1 December 2000 / Published online: 21 February 2001