ABSTRACT
Photorefractive and free-carrier nonlinearities in GaAs transfer energy from a strong picosecond pump, which is linearly polarized at an arbitrary angle to a weak s-polarized probe, into a p-polarized beam propagating in the probe direction. By placing the GaAs between a crossed pair of high-quality polarizers that are set to extinguish the probe in the absence of the pump, an efficient, high-contrast, high-speed optical switch is realized. By varying the pumpprobe ratio, delay, fluence, and polarization, we can maximize the intensity of the p-polarized component. This intensity with the pump present divided by that without the pump, the on-off ratio, is approximately 2 at fluences as low as 0.03 mJ/cm(2) and approaches 10,000 at fluences of 15 mJ/cm(2) and pump polarizations of 45 degrees .
ABSTRACT
Measurements and theoretical calculations are presented for the photorefractive effect in three semi-insulating semiconductors (GaAs:EL2, InP:Fe, and CdTe:V) using 29-psec pulses at a wavelength of 1.06 microm. The photorefractive gain is largest in the CdTe crystal and smallest in our InP sample. The major differences between the materials responsible for this are the electro-optic coefficients, the mobilities, the absorption coefficients, and the amount of electron-hole competition.
