%0 Journal Article %A Holliday, Keith %A Vauthey, Eric %A Croci, Mauro %A Renn, Alois %A Wild, Urs P. %T Detection of Specifically Oriented Impurities in an Amorphous Host Through Interference between Holograms Stored as Spectral Holes %J Journal of the Optical Society of America B %@ 0740-3224 %V 9 %N 6 %P 982-986 %D 1992 %U http://josab.osa.org/abstract.cfm?id=6290 %R 10.1364/JOSAB.9.000982 %U http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:3029 %X The constructive interference between two Stark-effect-broadened holograms produced by spectral hole burning is discussed. The holograms are burned at the same frequency but at different external electric-field values. The phase difference is selected to be zero so that constructive interference between the waves diffracted by each grating occurs. Experimentally it is found that a dip in the hologram efficiency that is not predicted by previous theory occurs for all reconstruction external electric-field values in the region between the original burn values. This dip is interpreted as being due to the time nonlinearity of the hologram burn process. The dip corresponds to those molecules, oriented in a specific direction with respect to the electric field, for which no Stark shift occurs and that are therefore resonant with the laser during the production of both holograms. The width of the anomalous feature is close to that of the hologram when the hologram is reconstructed at the original burn external electric-field strength. Other molecular orientations may be selected by burning pairs of holographic gratings at other combinations of the frequency and the electric field.