Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Persistent spectral hole burning and optical data processing
Karl K. Rebane
Abstract
Persistent spectral hole-burning (PSHB) and its applications in data storage and processing are described. Purely electronic zero-phonon lines having very high peak values in the low temperature impurity spectra of solids are considered. Limitations for very large capacity PSHB memories put by the number of impurity molecules to store one bit are discussed. Doped with impurities optical fiber memory is proposed as a means to have low impurity concentration simultaneously with a large number of the impurities to store one bit. Bit-by-bit (digital) storage is compared to the distributed one and the advantages of the two versions of the latter -- PSHB holography and PSHB modeling of neural networks -- are considered. An experiment of simultaneous read-out over coordinates and frequency in neural network modeling is described. Requirements to PSHB materials and possibilities of the existence of materials effective at high temperatures are discussed.