Space-charge field of a photorefractive grating in a planar waveguide based on a cubic crystal

Abstract

We consider the initial stage of formation of photorefractive gratings in planar waveguides based on cubic electrooptic crystals. We have obtained solutions for the components of the space-charge field for arbitrary ratios between parameters characterizing the spatial inhomogeneity of the light interference pattern in the waveguide as well as the diffusion length. The dependence of the component of the space-charge field parallel to the grating vector on its period in the initial section of the recording is also determined by the sum and difference of the transverse propagation constants of the interacting waveguide modes. We show that for waveguide interactions characterized by a small transverse scale of spatial inhomogeneity, the distributions of the space-charge field and the light intensity in the interference pattern are substantially different. These effects must be considered in analysis of the nonlinear interactions occurring in a refractive index grating due to the electrooptical effect.