Abstract

High density storage is a major need in the rapidly developing area of information technology. While the telecommunication traffic in fiber optic networks goes beyond tens of Gb/s and even reaches Tb/s in single fibers (using WDM), the most capable optical recording methods lag behind. Holographic recording and storage of information in thick media is an attractive way to increase the storage capacity with short access time and high retrieving rates. This is facilitated by the possibility to use the whole volume of the material and the angular or wavelength multiplexing capability. Most of the effort in this direction is done by using photorefractive crystals, such as LiNbO₃. There, several methods were developed to fix and store information.

© 1998 IEEE