Abstract
Anomalous long-time increase of the diffraction efficiency is observed in dark-decay experiments of photorefractive gratings in Ce:BaTiO3. It is deduced that a phase-conjugate beam is induced by the writing beam at acute angle to the +c axis of the crystal and it interferes with the other writing beam to form a second grating which is perpendicular to the first grating formed by the interference between two writing beams. The rising behaviour of the diffraction efficiency results from the different decay rates of these two photorefractive gratings. Furthermore, a simplified model of two gratings, both induced by two deep traps, is proposed to account for this phenomenon and the fitting results agree well with the experimental results.