New light valve based in photoinduced space charge fields in BSO-crystals

Abstract

The combined photoelectric and electrooptic properties of the BSO-crystal lead to a new possibility of realizing a real time spatial light modulator. Under certain geometrical conditions the crystal becomes birefringent in dependence on the local illuminance. Together with a suitable polarizer setup the crystal works as well as an incoherent to coherent converter as for contrast inversion.