A study of the optimization and the characteristics of a dry film photopolymerizable recording material is presented. The effects of intensity, the thickness, and the variation of the concentration of each component have been studied. Diffraction efficiencies of 80%, with energetic sensitivities of 40 mJ/cm², have been obtained in photosensitive films of a 35-μm thickness with a spatial frequency of 1000 lines/mm.

We theoretically analyze Airy beams by solving the exact vectorial Helmholtz equation using boundary conditions at a diffraction aperture. As result, the diffracted beams are obtained in the whole space; thus, we demonstrate that the parabolic trajectories are larger than those previously reported, showing that the Airy beams start to form before the Fourier plane. We also demonstrate the possibility of using a new type of Airy beams (SAiry beams) with finite energy that can be generated at the focal plane of the lens due to diffraction by a circular aperture of a spherical wave modified by a cubic phase. The finite energy ensured by the principle of conservation of energy of a diffracted beam.

A photopolymerizable holographic material has been obtained and characterized using agent ${\mathrm{N,N}}^{\prime }$ -dihydroxiethylenbisacrylamide as crosslinking. A sensitivity of 5 mJ/cm² and a diffraction efficiency around of 70% have been reached for holograms recorded at 633 nm with a spatial frequency of 1000 lines/mm. High sensitivities can be obtained with low intensities, and this is important in applications such as holographic interferometry and the fabrication of holographic optical elements.

We present theoretical results for angular responses of transmitted and diffracted beams in mixed amplitude–phase holographic gratings. Experimental results for gratings recorded in photographic emulsions and developed without a bleaching bath, with diffraction efficiencies of $>20\%$, are also presented. The model shows an angular shift between minimum transmittance and maximum diffraction efficiency when both index modulation and absorption coefficient modulation are present. Also, the Borrmann effect was found outside the Bragg angle. This method can be extended to a study of the mechanism of image formation in materials such as bacteriorhodopsin and azo-dye-doped polymers that exhibit both types of modulations (index and absorption).

In this paper, we describe a photopolymerizable silica glass based on acrylamide (AA) and N,N’-methylenebisacrylamide (BMA) as monomers, triethanolamine (TEA) as coinitiator and yellowish eosin (YE) as photoinitiator. We studied different compositions, analyzing the diffraction efficiency, energetic exposure and effective thickness obtained in the holographic gratings. A diffraction efficiency of 60 % with an energetic exposure of 139 mJ/cm ² and an effective thickness of 1.1 mm were obtained. Also, by varying the photopolymerizable composition of the material diffraction efficiencies higher than 80 % can be reached with an energetic exposure of 10 mJ/cm ² and an effective thickness of 113 µm. These values are similar to those obtained in conventional photopolymer systems in polyvinylalcohol and better than the values reached in other sol-gel compositions. Also, 9 holograms were angular multiplexed with diffraction efficiencies between 6 and 12 % and total exposure time shorter than 150 ms, with a dynamic range M/#=2.4.