Abstract

During recent year, the photorefractive materials are attractive in many applications such as optical image processing and optical computing because they have more lower threshold power and easily realize phase conjugation Potassium sodium strontium barium niobate crystal is one of the best candidates. It has open structure and large structure tolerance for dopants with different valence There are two different ways to improve the photorefractive properties of the materials. 1) by adjusting the composition of materials and 2) doping cation ions. This paper is to describe the doping effects on the ferroelectric and photorefractive properties. The composition of potassium sodium strontium barium niobate was chosen as 92% of A-sites occupied by K, Na, Sr and Ba ions. The dopants such as Ce, Pr, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Ti and Mn with 0.01-0.1wt% were adopted for modifying the properties. Potassium sodium strontium barium niobate crystals were grown from platinum crucible by Czochralski method with induction heating in air atmosphere. The growth conditions are pulling direction: [001], the rate of pulling/rotation: 0.2-0.4. The size of as-grown crystal is up to ϕ 35 × 35 mm From the shape of hysteresis loops, the doping effect on ferroelectric properties of potassium sodium strontium barium niobate crystals were revealed to have three categories: expansive, stable and shrink for Fe, Cu and others, respectively After the temperature recycle from 100 to 500K, the d₃₃ value for Cu-doped crystal does not change, which suggest that the Cu ion is a good polarization stabilizer. The self-pumped phase conjugation refractivities for Ce, Co and Cu-doped crystals are much higher than the others. They are 70% at 514.5nm for Cu-doped, 73% at 514.5nm for Co-doped and 84% at 632.8nm for Ce-doped respectively.

© 1996 IEEE