What is Resonant Holography?
Resonant holography is a novel technique to maximize the optical efficiency of photorefractive holograms, which has been invented by our group and now being developed exclusively. Photorefractive holograms have great potential for optical interconnects, data storage and imaging applications due to the flexibility of reconfiguring the optical input-output relationship. However, the optical efficiency of photorefractive materials with reasonably fast recording speed is typically only a few percent. Recently, we demonstrated that the efficiency of photorefrative holograms can be dramatically increased by sandwiching the hologram inside a Fabry-Perot resonator as shown in Fig. 1. The resonator, which consists of a partially reflecting mirror (PRM) and a perfect mirror, is tuned to make every partial diffracted wave interfere constructively with all other partial diffracted waves. In this condition known as optical resonance, the efficiency is limited only by the losses inside the cavity. W
