Abstract

The photon echoes of various kinds have been considered as a possible scheme of optical memory device. In particular the backward stimulated photon echo has been given considerable attention because of its various attractive characteristics, including long storage time, phase conjugation¹, and spatial and temporal correlation and convolution properties.² By utilizing both the spatial and the frequency, or temporal domains, this makes for potentially very high capacity and high speed optical memory or optical computing scheme. In the experiments reported here, we show that the backward stimulated echo is indeed a viable high-capacity optical memory scheme by storing and retrieving realistic numbers of optical data pulses, and studying the following specific questions. What are the parameters that determine the optimum data rate and data length? Is there any interference effect, or crosstalk, among the echo pulses? How are the signal to noise ratio and the signal fidelity affected by the hyperfine structure and spectral hole burning?

© 1988 Optical Society of America