Two-wave mixing in cubic photorefractive arbitrary-cut crystals

The two-wave interaction on volume holographic phase gratings in a cubic optically active photorefractive arbitrary-cut piezoelectric crystal of symmetry class 23 has been analyzed. It is established that there is a certain critical thickness of the crystal, which separates all values of the crystal thickness into two characteristic intervals. In a crystal with the thickness below critical, a polarization-optimized relative intensity of the object wave reaches maximum for the {100} cut. For the crystals of greater thickness, this maximum is attained for the cuts other than {100}, in particular (for certain fixed thicknesses) for the $$\{ 11\bar 1\} $$ cut. A method for determining such cuts is proposed and illustrated for a Bi12SiO20 crystal.