Photorefractive holographic recording in strontium barium niobate fibers

We describe what are to our knowledge the first photorefractive holographic recordings in a fiber. A plane-wave reference and an image-carrying object beam are incident upon the fiber in a reflection geometry. We report results on the angular sensitivity of the recordings, the image quality, and readout efficiency as a function of the reference-wave input angle when the object wave propagates along the bore of the fiber. These experiments are carried out for two relatively short, 4- and 8-mm, multimode 1-mm-diameter fibers. The results suggest that an array of fibers might favorably replace bulk materials for certain computer and signal-processing applications.