Holography with guided optical waves

This paper deals with “waveguide holograms” recorded in a layer of storage material covering a planar dielectric waveguide. Reference and read-out waves are guided modes of the waveguide. Their field in the storage medium is evanescent. A theory of the diffraction efficiencies of these waveguide holograms is presented fors-polarized wavefields. To calculate the hologram structure the attenuation of the reference wave caused by absorption in the light-sensitive storage material is taken into account. Analytical expressions for the local and the overall diffraction efficiencies and for the intensity profiles of the diffracted fields are derived. The dependence of these quantities on experimental parameters (the waveguide thickness, the mode numbers of the reference and read-out waves, and the angle of incidence of the plane object wave) is presented graphically, i.e., by computer plots. Grating couplers for integrated optics can be made by waveguide holography. We consider this application to be interesting because incoupling efficiencies for Gaussian beams of up to 96% can be achieved theoretically.