Abstract

The sillenite crystals BSO, BTO and BGO have a great potential for real-time interferometric applications. It is important to optimize the photorefractive (PR) two-wave mixing (TWM) gain in these crystals with respect to the orientation of the grating vector and the light polarization. In Ref. ¹it was shown that neglecting the optical activity the maximum photorefractive coupling for $(\overline{1}10)$-cut crystals occurs for the grating orientation $\overrightarrow{K}\Vert [111]$ and for the same (i.e. [111]) light polarization of the waves, independently of whether the piezoelectric effect is taken into account or not. Since then this conclusion has been supposed to be true also in the case of nonzero optical activity.²

© 1998 IEEE