MOSCOW, November 2. /TASS/. A group of scientists from the Kirensky Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Siberian Federal University’s (SFU) Institute of Engineering Physics and Radio Electronics have devised a new method of creating a controllable diffraction grating – an optical system based on the light diffraction phenomenon (the light’s ability to bend around a barrier), the Siberian Federal University’s press service said on Friday.

Diffraction gratings play a key role in such fields as acousto-optics, integral optics, holography, optical data processing, spectral analysis and others.

“Scientists at the Kirensky Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences have presented a new approach to creating a dynamically controllable diffraction grating in atomic media, where the restrictions existing at the moment are absent. Diffraction gratings are capable of refracting light beams in different directions, and for this reason they are used in many devices,” the news release states.

The new type of gratings makes it possible to control the direction of light beams and their intensity at any given moment. This property is expected to give a fresh impetus to the related branches of physics.

In the past, a variety of methods were proposed for making such gratings, one of them based on the phenomenon of electromagnetically induced transparency. In this particular case, laser radiation (control radiation) under certain conditions permits the propagation of light through an otherwise opaque medium. This makes it possible to use it as a diffraction grating, but the signal received in this way is not that intensive and difficult to control.

“In contrast to similar approaches, our solution is based on using the effects of Raman amplification, which makes it possible to achieve effective diffraction of a light beam and its splitting into several ones. The grating we propose can serve, for instance, as a splitter of laser beams,” one of the researchers, chief of the Coherent Optics Laboratory at the Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vasily Arkhipkin, told TASS. He remarked, though, that the proposed approach would be not very easy to implement and requires fundamental and costly hardware and knowhow.” Work on the project was enabled by a grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.