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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Challenges for ultra-high density spectral storage

Zameer U. Hasan

Published Feb 7, 2008• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

ABSTRACT A review of the status of ultra-high density spectral storage has been presented. Keywords: Ultra-High Density Spectral Storage, Spectral Memories, Terabits Storage, Spectral Holeburning, Optical Holeburning, Multi-layer Th infilm, Power-Gated Holeburning, Optical Materials, Rare Earths 1. INTRODUCTION Spectral Storage offers the highest possible storage densities thus far. Terabits per square inch and even more have been shown to be possible, in principle. Spectral storage is unlike any other type of storage. Magnetic, holographic, multi-layer storage [1], etc., are all macroscopic scale storage in the sense that the macroscopic properties of the recording material are transformed to record a series of zeros and ones. Spectral storage is at the atomic or microscopic scale. A small number of atoms in a solid-state medium are used to store a ‘bit’ of information. This is responsible for the high storage density of spectral storage. A cubic micron of solid has ~10 18

DOI
10.1117/12.771725

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ABSTRACT A review of the status of ultra-high density spectral storage has been presented. Keywords: Ultra-High Density Spectral Storage, Spectral Memories, Terabits Storage, Spectral Holeburning, Optical Holeburning, Multi-layer Th infilm, Power-Gated Holeburning, Optical Materials, Rare Earths 1. INTRODUCTION Spectral Storage offers the highest possible storage densities thus far. Terabits per square inch and even more have been shown to be possible, in principle. Spectral storage is unlike any other type of storage. Magnetic, holographic, multi-layer storage [1], etc., are all macroscopic scale storage in the sense that the macroscopic properties of the recording material are transformed to record a series of zeros and ones. Spectral storage is at the atomic or microscopic scale. A small number of atoms in a solid-state medium are used to store a ‘bit’ of information. This is responsible for the high storage density of spectral storage. A cubic micron of solid has ~10 18
It was envisaged that spectral holeburning based optical memory will provide orders of magnitude improvement in storage densities. The progress has basically been hampered by the lack of materials with proper performance characteristics. In the past two decades, novel atomic scale processes involved in holeburning have been investigated in detail in order to improve the performance of existing materials and to engineer new ones. On the other hand, significant advances have been made in optical storage techniques to use the materials available. And now, new materials that can approach the specifications of a memory device using different techniques for the storage are either available or are just over the horizon. This paper reviews the status of different classes of spectral holeburning materials suitable for memory devices.
Spectral Storage using optical holeburning has the potential of providing ultrahigh densities approaching terabits per square inch. The progress on multilayer spectral storage in Eu-doped sulfides has been presented. It is shown that atomic scale tailoring of these structures is possible in order to design several different europium optical centers. In the spectrum of these centers, ultrahigh density storage can be achieved with the simultaneous optimization of other performance parameters. Results are also presented for tailoring the barrier and the capping layers.
In the form of micro-particles europium doped alkaline earth sulfides have been shown to exhibit high density of permanent spectral holes. The photon-gated spectral holeburning (PGHB) in these systems provided the most promising characteristics of any material known to date. These spectral holes can be used as optical memory. However, for any optical storage device either large size single crystals or thin films are required. Thin films of these materials are grown by Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) technique. This fast and simple growth technique is superior the single crystal growth or the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) as far as the holeburning properties are concerned. Transparent glassy MgS:Eu and CaS:Eu films have been grown and tested for the spectral holeburning properties. Critical parameters such as the relative concentration of Eu2+ and Eu3+, and optical quality of thin films have been investigated. Int his paper we report on the growth and the high-density optical holeburning in these films. The density of spectral holes has been further increased by burning in multiple Eu-centers in a material and by depositing multiple layers of thin films of different materials in a stack.
(1) Photochemical Hole Burning (PHB) has a possibility to offer us an optical memory with ultra-high data storage density of more than 1011 bits/cm2 theoretically1). Such high data density can be achieved by multiplexing the information additional wavelength dimension besides the x-y spatial domain. The multiplexing of the information is realized by burning a sequence of narrow spectral holes as signals in the spectrum of a PHB material. Then the degree of information multiplexing depends on the degree of the multiple holes in the spectrum. The most essential subject for PHB memory is how densely and how many multiple holes can be formed without any interaction between any two holes.
We are developing a high density, high speed optical memory, using rare-earth doped hole- burning materials. These materials are theoretically capable of achieving storage densities of 1000 Gigabits/cm3 at input/output (I/O) rates of several gigabits/sec. One remarkable attribute of this storage concept is that both the temporal and spatial information encoded on a laser beam can be stored. Because both the temporal and spatial information can be stored, digital data can be recorded serially as a data or packet stream as well as holographically using the page format. During the past year we have achieved a breakthrough in demonstrating random access holographic data storage at high frame rates. Five hundred holograms were stored and retrieved with very good fidelity at 30 Hz (video rate). Each holographic image with 512 multiplied by 488 pixels could be randomly accessed during the storage and retrieval process. This frame rate is the highest demonstrated frame rate for any optical technique. This breakthrough was achieved through the invention of a memory architecture that allows multiple holographic frames to be stored without any mechanical beam scanning. In this new architecture multiplexing of 500 holograms was achieved by stepping the laser frequency over a range covered by high speed acousto-optic modulators (AOM).