Interdigitated coplanar electrodes for enhanced sensitivity in a photorefractive polymer

Organic photorefractive polymer composites can be made to exhibit near 100% diffraction efficiency and fast writing times, though large external slants are needed to project the applied field onto the grating vector. We show here that the use of interdigitated electrodes on a single plane provides similar performance to these standard devices and geometries but without a external slant angle. This new device's structure also greatly improves the diffraction efficiency and sensitivity compared to less slanted standard devices necessary for some real applications, such as holographic displays, optical coherence imaging, and in-plane switching. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America