Photopolymerizable glass with high refractive index species: overview of emerging implementations

Abstract

We present an overview of the main properties and the emerging implementations corresponding to a photopolymerizable glass modified with high refractive index species (HRIS) incorporated at molecular level. The study concerns to transmission and reflection holograms in Bragg and Raman-Nath regimens and polarization properties of gratings with high spatial frequencies are also analyzed demonstrating a strong dependence of the refractive index modulation with the polarization state of the reading beam. Not limited to the study of the optical properties of the photopolymerizable glass we propose two applications of the holographic material. The first one is the fabrication of polarizers elements with high performance at low cost such us holographic polarizers and holographic polarizers beam splitters. The second application concerns to the holographic recording of stables modes exhibiting high diffraction efficiency. Also, we have recently extended our studies to ultrashort pulse lasers in femtosecond regime. The photopolymerizable gratings are good candidates as optic elements to beam manipulation of ultrashort pulse lasers.