Abstract

Two-photon absorption 3-D optical memories have the potential for simple media fabrication, parallel access for high data transfer rates, high volumetric storage density, and low raw bit error rates (BER).¹-² The writing or erasure takes place at the intersection of two orthogonally propagating beams where a unique physical location is allocated to each stored bit. The data can be stored and retrieved in several formats in a single operation. By using either orthogonal-propagating beams or counter-propagating beams, it is possible to control the region of overlap of the two beams to be a single point, a line, or a plane. We will refer to those data formats as bit, vector, and image (or page) storage.

© 1997 Optical Society of America