Highly efficient photorefractive polymer-dispersed liquid crystals

We report on high-resolution photorefractive polymer-dispersed liquid crystals that lead to high diffraction efficiency at lower applied fields compared with photorefractive polymers. The diffraction efficiency reaches 100% internally for 105-μm-thick samples at a field of 8 V/μm. Net optical gain and diffraction efficiencies of 56% are demonstrated in 53-μm-thick devices. Subsecond response times have also been obtained using polymeric matrices with good transport properties.