High thickness acrylamide photopolymer for peristrophic multiplexing

Abstract

The acrylamide photopolymers are considered interesting materials for holographic media. They have high diffraction efficiency (ratio of the intensities of the diffracted and the incident beams), an intermediate energetic sensitivity among other materials and post-processing steps are not necessary, therefore the media is not altered. The layers of these materials, about 1 mm thick, are a suitable media for recording many diffraction gratings in the same volume of photopolymer using peristrophic multiplexing technique, with great practical importance in the field of holographic memories type WORM (write once read many). In this work we study the recording of diffraction gratings by peristrophic multiplexing with axis of rotation perpendicular to the recording media. The photopolymer is composed of acrylamide as the polymerizable monomer, triethanolamine as radical generator, yellowish eosin as sensitizer and a binder of polyvinyl alcohol. We analyze the holographic behaviour of the material during recording and reconstruction of diffraction gratings using a continuous Nd:YAG laser (532 nm) at an intensity of 5 mW/cm2 as recording laser. The response of the material is monitored after recording with an He-Ne laser. We study the recording process of unslanted diffraction gratings of 1125 lines/mm. The diffraction efficiency of each hologram is seen to decrease as the number of holograms recorded increases, due to consumption of the available dynamic range, in a constant exposure scheduling. It can be seen that the photopolymer works well with high energy levels, without excessive dispersion of light by noise gratings. In order to homogenize the diffraction efficiency of each hologram we use the method proposed by Pu. This method is designed to share all or part of the avaliable dynamic range of the recording material among the holograms to be multiplexed. Using exposure schedules derived from this method we have used 3 scheduling recordings from the algorithm used. Additionaly, we use an exponential scheduling recording in order to correct the exposure times from the first iteration of the algorithm.