Optical self-enhancement of photorefractive holograms

It is well known that dynamic volume holograms, such as those stored in photorefractive crystals, decay upon readout. Though such a property can be useful in many real-time processing applications, it is often a drawback in optical data storage applications when an information set may be recalled multiple times or during the sequential storage of multiple holograms. There have been approaches for the sustainment of decaying holograms via rerecording as well as exposure schedule algorithms for the storage of multiple holograms. In this paper, we present experimental results verifying a novel optical proposal for the enhancement and restoration of decaying holograms in photorefractive media