Temperature dependence on the grating formation in a low-Tg polymeric photorefractive composite

We investigated a dependence of the grating formation on the temperature in polymeric photorefractive (PR) composite, in terms of magnitude and buildup speed of the PR grating. For polymeric PR materials, the temperature is one of the most important factors together with the external electric field because it is closely related on photocharge generation efficiency, mobility of generated carrier, electro-optic coefficient tensor, and so on. Above the glass transition temperature, the diffraction efficiency of degenerate four-wave mixing decreased with increasing the temperature; it can be explained with the magnitude of space-charge field and the electro-optic behavior at different temperatures. The space-charge field decreased linearly with increasing temperature due to a decrease in the photocharge generation efficiency and an increase in the hole detrapping by the high dark conductivity. Also as we expected, the PR grating buildup speed, which is strongly dependent on the photoconductivity, steeply decreased with increasing the temperature, and its tendency was similar to the temperature dependence of the phase shift.