The advances of photorefractive optics have demonstrated many useful and practical applications, which include the development of photorefractive optic devices for computer communication needs. To name a couple significant applications: the large capacity optical memory, which can greatly improve the accessible high-speed CD-ROM and the dynamic photorefractive gratings, which can be used for all-optic switches for high-speed fiber optic networks. This book is an important reference both for technical and non-technical staffs who are interested in this field.

Sixteen chapters present...

The authors present basic optical principles, particularly reflection, refraction, aberrations, diffraction and interference. Building on this foundation, they then discuss a wide variety of optical devices and processes, including simple optical instruments, photodetectors, spatial light modulators, holography and lasers. They devote two chapters to linear system transforms and signal processing, and the book concludes with a chapter on fiber optics. The book contains many worked examples and over 250 problems.

While there are books treating individual topics contained in this book, this will be the first single volume providing a cohesive treatment on this subject as a whole. This goes beyond optical communications in that it includes related topics such as sensing, displays, computing, and data storage.