Abstract

The diffraction properties of reflective anisotropic gratings, which can be recorded in photoanisotropic medium with uniaxial birefringence by three-dimensional vector holography (3DVH), were characterized with the use of coupled-wave analysis (CWA). By investigating the perturbation of the dielectric tensor, we demonstrated that the gratings with sinusoidal distribution of the azimuthal angle of the optic axis diffract polarized light which in the ordinary and extraordinary components are converted for incident light. The polarization conversion property was consistent with that calculated by a numerical method. In addition, it was shown that the CWA enables highly accurate calculation of the diffraction efficiency with wavelength dispersion when the amplitude of the azimuthal angle is substantially small.