Effect of a random pattern through a multimode-fiber bundle on angular and spatial selectivity in volume holograms: experiments and theory.

Abstract

We demonstrate a multimode-fiber bundle reference scheme in a photorefractive volume hologram and discuss its angular/spatial selectivity both experimentally and theoretically. We measure the angular/spatial selectivity, changing distances between the photorefractive crystal and the output facet of the multimode-fiber bundle. The distance variation leads to a beam-size change in the reference beam, however, the object-beam size was fixed in all cases. The dependence of the angular/spatial selectivity for random-pattern (RP) referencing on a hologram dimension was examined and the characteristics compared with those derived from Gaussian referencing. Experimental results show that the RP referencing makes little contribution to the enhancement in angular selectivity, even though it leads to a considerable enhancement in spatial selectivity. The angular selectivity is mainly dependent on the dimension of a volume hologram, even with RP referencing. It is also noteworthy that the use of an RP beam can cause some high-frequency noise in the angular-multiplexing regime, which should be avoided in a hologram memory system. Nonetheless, the spatial selectivity of the RP referencing shows nearly no dependence on hologram dimension, and is mainly dependent on the transversal speckle size of the random-pattern beam. These characteristics can also be verified by the numerical results presented here, which are in good agreement with the experimental results.