A Novel photopolymer with reduced grating distortion

Abstract

Photopolymers are an attractive holographic material candidate for high-density data storage, optical filters, and display applications. Photopolymers gained great attention as a promising candidate materials for the holograms due to their relatively large refractive index modulation (Δn=10-2), high sensitivity, and low cost. Recent research on a photopolymerizable holographic recording material is based on PVA/Acryl amide. Where as an existing PVA/AA photopolymer has merits of high refractive index modulation, good optical quality, high diffraction efficiency and moderate sensitivity, but volume shrinkage during photopolymerization is a serious problem. In this study, we synthesized a novel photopolymer to prevent volume shrinkage by introduction of the chemically crosslinked polymeric binder containing pendant double bond which will react with the photopolymerizable monomer during recording process. Since three dimensional(3D) network binder binds recorded grating, our photopolymer is expected to have an advantage of preventing grating distortion due to the low volume shrinkage.