Abstract

The search for proper materials for all-optical data storage has become a critical issue in the development of a practical system that would provide high capacity and high accessing speed operation. In order to characterize a material to determine whether it is a candidate for optical information storage, three basic properties that deal with the material's light/matter interaction response (its ability to retain information, the driving power requirements for light/matter interaction, and the material's response speed) must be considered as a whole, balancing one property against another. Recent developments have shown certain materials that utilize photochromic two-photon absorption phenomena^[1] and time-domain frequency selective storage (TDFSS) methods^[2,3] are superb in performing three-dimensional, ultra-high capacity, and ultra-high speed data storage. Nevertheless, the two-photon materials need always be driven by a very powerful laser source due to the inherent low absorption cross-section of the two-photon process and the fact that TDFSS is constrained by the required cryogenic cooling operation. In this paper, we present a novel erasable and nonvolatile optical memory based on the application of high-efficiency polymeric material with reversible photoinduced birefringence. All the disadvantages of the two-photon absorption and TDFSS mechanisms are invisible to the synthetic polymer because its storage does not rely on quantum mechanic state excitation but on fast photoinduced electric dipole rotation.

© 1991 Optical Society of America