Higher diffraction order photorefractive optical beam splitter

A higher diffraction order photorefractive (PR) optical beam splitter has been realized based on a PR higher diffraction order grating. In the experiments, the beam splitter was produced by two-wave coupling at a small incident angle in Fe:LiNbO₃ using the output from a He–Ne laser at 632.8 nm. An incident signal beam containing three different wavelengths (632.8, 532.0 and 488.0 nm) was split into multi-output beams by the beam splitter. The size of higher diffraction order is given and the influence of crystal thickness is discussed. Results show that the higher diffraction order PR optical beam splitter provides a practical method to split a multi-wavelength signal beam.