Trapping the grating envelope in bulk photorefractive media

We introduce the concept of traveling grating envelopes to study the erasure dynamics in bulk photorefractive media. This new technique provides considerable physical insight into the observed photorefractive transients. We propose and demonstrate experimentally, in a Ce-doped SBN:60 crystal, two novel ways of extending the grating lifetime by trapping the grating envelope inside the medium. The incident beam ratio and the readout geometry have the largest effect on how long the grating can be read out.