Ba0.77Ca0.23TiO3 (BCT): a new photorefractive material to replace BaTiO3 in applications

Abstract The most popular photorefractive material BaTiO3 suffers from a crippling defect when applications are considered: its phase transition around room temperature that can destroy its photorefractive characteristics, if not the crystal itself. Some years ago, University of Osnabruck [1] , proposed and successfully grew Ba0.77Ca0.23TiO3 an alloy derived from BaTiO3, in which the phase transition was pushed away towards low temperature. The remaining question was then: does this new material keep the good photorefractive properties that made the success of BaTiO3? We will present here some theoretical and experimental results that allow us to answer this question and that show that despite some differences in the photorefractive properties between BaTiO3 and BCT, the new crystal is an extremely promising materials for photorefractive applications, such as phase conjugation or dynamic holographic intracavity laser mode selection.