Abstract

Recent years have seen the development of a variety of techniques for the storage and processing of optical data streams in materials with [1-10] and without [11-12] intrinsic frequency selectivity. These techniques are characterized by very high bandwidth and relatively large time-bandwidth product. It is known, that the optical processes responsible for the storage and/or processing of temporal waveform data frequently also lead to the storage of spatial waveform information [13,14]. It has been demonstrated, for example, that sequences of images can be stored. [5,7,8] An area that is relatively unexplored, however, relates to the possible interactions between stored temporal and spatial information. We explore one example of how the temporal and spatial information stored within a material can interact and lead to a novel functionality, i. e. the passive routing of optical beams along one of many possible temporally encoded directions.

© 1995 Optical Society of America