Understanding the optical and electrical properties of a new photorefractive potassium niobate crystal

Optical and electrical measurements have been made on a new codoped potassium niobate crystal that yields a significant increase in linear absorption, photocurrent, and photorefractive beam coupling efficiency. The Ag impurity enters the K site, changing the local field in the lattice. The Fe in the Nb site, perturbed by the replacement of the next near-neighbor K with Ag, is responsible for the enhanced linear and nonlinear properties. The modified material parameters result in an increase of the photorefractive counter-propagating two-beam coupling efficiency.