Abstract
Recently, we demonstrated that photorefractive mechanisms in GaAs have picosecond response times and that GaAs is a sensitive material for high-speed recording, primarily because of its large mobility-lifetime product.1 Even so, the weak-beam gains measured in our two-beam coupling experiments were limited by the size of the electrooptic coefficient in GaAs to a few percent at fluences of ~0.1 mJ/cm2 (i.e., 1 pJ/μm2). Such small modulation ratios are clearly Inadequate for most switching applications. Here, however, we demonstrate efficient high-contrast high-speed switching in GaAs by orienting the grating k vector along the <110> direction and by using the polarization rotation associated with photorefractive beam coupling, as suggested by Partovi et al.2 in their work with cw beams.
© 1988 Optical Society of America
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