Holographic performance of silicon polymer films based on photoswitchable molecules

Holographic silicon polymer films based on photoswitchable molecules are studied with respect to their performance for hologram recording, with photoswitchable ruthenium sulfoxide complexes as an example. Our systematic study reveals that it is possible to record elementary holographic lossy gratings with outstanding quality with respect to their dynamics and in-and off-Bragg read-out features. Furthermore, the possibility for the recording of multiple holograms within the same volume element via angular multiplexing as well as the recording with continuous-wave and a fs-laser pulse train is successfully demonstrated. At the same time, a strong limitation of the maximum diffraction efficiency in the order of similar to 10(-3) is found that cannot be counterbalanced by either the tuning of material (thickness, concentration,...) or recording parameters (repetition rate, wavelength,...). This limitation - being severe for any type of holographic applications - is discussed and compared with the performance of high-efficient single-crystalline reference holographic media. We conclude that the potential of sulfoxide compounds may be hidden in holography until it becomes possible to synthesize polymer films with appropriate three-dimensional structural arrangement of the photoswitchable compounds. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement