Self-diffraction of light by excitons

A theoretical investigation is made of the self-diffraction of coherent light by excitons. It is shown that this is due to the non-Bose statistics of the excitons and is accompanied by the dynamic effects of interaction between the interference pattern and a light-induced holographic grating. It is suggested that dynamic self-diffraction may be used as a new efficient method of determining the optical parameters and visualizing crystal inhomogeneities in the exciton range of the absorption spectrum.