Time development of a persistent hole burning in multiple-scattering media

We investigated the time development of persistent hole burning in photoreactive and multiple-scattering media. In this hole burning, a writing laser beam recodes the volume speckle pattern inside the medium through the photoreactive process, and then the luminescence intensity excited by a reading beam is measured as a function of the frequency or wave vector difference between the writing and reading beams. The time development reflects the statistics of the intensity fluctuations in the speckle inside the medium. One of the striking results is that the maximum hole depth is approximately 0.26 . We distinguish three types of samples according to the geometric configurations and the photoreactive processes and discuss the hole shape, hole width, and the depth during time development. Hole burning experiments were also performed using a spiropyran derivative photochromic dye. The experimental results showed good agreement with the theory.