Recording and erasure of photorefractive holograms in undoped BTO crystal at moderate to high intensities of 639.7  nm laser under action of 532  nm laser pre-illumination.

We investigate recording and erasure of photorefractive holographic gratings in an undoped Bi12TiO20 crystal in a moderate to high intensity regime of the recording beams at 639.7 nm without and with the action of laser pre-illumination at 532 nm. The detected hologram without pre-illumination indicates the participation of two photorefractive electronic gratings in its recording process, and the diffracted signal by itself exhibits a fivefold enhancement when the total intensity increases from 38.4 to 214.5 mW/cm(2). The dependence of the measured total diffraction efficiency on intensity was investigated and showed linear behavior. At least three gratings are present in the regime of pre-illumination and participate in the writing and erasure of holographic mechanisms. Two of them are electronic, and one is hole-based, with a phase difference Delta phi between them. The theoretical approach used to analyze the total diffraction efficiency based upon the photorefractivity standard model, and considering the presence of the three gratings, showed good agreement with the holographic erasure experimental data and permitted us to compute Delta phi, which exhibited strong and unusual dependence on the total intensity. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America.