Abstract

Photochemical spectral hole-burning (PSHB) has attracted particular attention in the past decade because of its potential for frequency domain optical storage. In order to apply PSHB to a practical optical memory, the material should have high burning temperature, high thermal stability, erasability and high frequency multiplexing. Two ways are possible to increase the storage density: one is to narrow the homogeneous line width, the other is to broaden the inhomogeneous line width. In previous works, the larger inhomogeneous line width (greater than 1,000 cm^–1) has been reached in polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) doped with two kinds of Zn-benzoporphyrin derivatives with roughly the same hole-burning efficiencies [1]. In this paper, the authors investigate systematically the optical properties of Zn-benzoporphyrin derivatives, their hole-burning mechanisms, thermal stability and electron-phonon coupling in cellulose acetate (CA) and in PMMA matrices. The choice of CA was motivated mainly by the fact this polymer allows to prepare samples with excellent optical quality.

© 1994 Optical Society of America