Investigation of photorefractive two-wave coupling in Cr-doped strontium barium niobate crystal

We present here the experimental results of photorefractive two-wave coupling in the congruent strontium barium niobate (SBN:61) crystal doped with 1000ppm Cr. Employing a He-Ne laser (632,8nm), we observed the coupling characteristics under different conditions. The crystal shows excellent photorefractive properties, with a high coupling coefficient nearly 6cm^-1 as the beam intensity ratio m is less than 100. The saturated coupling coefficient of SBN:61:Cr shows a maximum at a certain external beam crossing angle 2θ_peak, which varies with different m, showing a nearly linear dependence on m, The saturated coupling response time τ is measured to be less than 0.8 s. The response time decreased with increasing beam crossing angles no matter how large m is. We also observed the behaviour of the probe beam in reversed experimental procedures. We found that the probe beam shows a bistable state in both procedures.