Photorefractive Materials and Their Applications 1

Jean-Pierre Huignard, PhD, earned the engineer diploma in optical science from Ecole Superieure d'Optique and a doctorate in physical science from Paris-Orsay University. He currently serves as Senior Scientist at Thales. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and received a prize from the French Academy of Sciences.

This is the first volume of a set of three within the Springer Series in Optical Sciences, and is devoted to photorefractive effects, photorefractive materials, and their applications. Since the publication of our first two Springer books on Photorefractive Materials and Their Applications (Topics in Applied Physics, Vols. 61 and 62) almost 20 years ago, a lot of research has been done in this area. New and often expected effects have been discovered, theoretical models developed, known effects finally explained, and novel applications proposed. We believe that the field has now reached a high level of maturity, even if research continues in all areas mentioned above and with new discoveries arriving quite regularly. We therefore have decided to invite some of the top experts in the field to put together the state of the art in their respective fields. This after we had been encouraged to do so for more than ten years by the publisher, due to the fact that the former volumes were long out of print.

Photorefractive materials is an important and growing area of research

Light-Induced Dynamic Gratings and Photorefraction.- Fundamentals of Photorefractive Phenomena.- Space-Charge Driven Holograms in Anisotropic Media.- Space-Charge Wave Effects in Photorefractive Materials.- Feedback-Controlled Photorefractive Beam Coupling.- Band-to-Band Photorefraction.- Two-Step Recording in Photorefractive Crystals.- Spatio-Temporal Instabilities and Self-Organization.- Photorefractive Waveguides.- Photorefractive Solitons.- Thermal Fixing of Photoinduced Gratings.- Electrical Fixing of Photoinduced Gratings.