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Optics Letters

Demonstration of partial erasing of picosecond temporal optical data by use of accumulated photon echoes

Ryuzi Yano, Naoshi Uesugi

Published Dec 1, 1999• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrated partial erasing of temporal optical data on a picosecond time scale by use of accumulated photon echoes. In a photon-echo memory the temporal data at time tau are stored as a frequency grating of period 1/tau in the absorption spectrum of a material. Partial erasing of the temporal data is achieved by irradiation of the material with a pulse pair at time separation tau , but the phase of one of the pulses is shifted 180 degrees . This process does not produce a frequency grating, and no echo is emitted. The experiment was performed with a dye-doped polymer film. The 180 degrees phase shift was obtained by use of a half-wave plate.

DOI
10.1364/ol.24.001753

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We demonstrated partial erasing of temporal optical data on a picosecond time scale by use of accumulated photon echoes. In a photon-echo memory the temporal data at time tau are stored as a frequency grating of period 1/tau in the absorption spectrum of a material. Partial erasing of the temporal data is achieved by irradiation of the material with a pulse pair at time separation tau , but the phase of one of the pulses is shifted 180 degrees . This process does not produce a frequency grating, and no echo is emitted. The experiment was performed with a dye-doped polymer film. The 180 degrees phase shift was obtained by use of a half-wave plate.
The stimulated photon echo memory using persistent hole-burning materials has been attracting much attention as a possible candidate for high-density data storage. Most studies have been related to the writing and reading processes and little attention has been paid for a partial erasing. We demonstrate for the first time that partial erasing of photon echo memory can be accomplished by simply employing a half-wave plate. In a photon echo memory, the write and data pulses with a time separation /spl tau/ excite a hole-burning material. These pulses create a periodic absorption modulation (periodic hole) with a frequency of l//spl tau/ in the absorption spectrum. When the read pulse excites the sample, a stimulated echo pulse is emitted at /spl tau/ after the read pulse, We note that a bit of data is stored as a periodic hole in the sample. A rotation of a half-wave plate inserted in the data pulse path (which induce a retardation of /spl lambda//2) creates two periodic holes that have the same frequency and opposite phase. Therefore, erasing a periodic hole can be done by rotating the wave plate. A dye (Sulforhodamin 640) doped polymer film (polyvinyl alcohol) cooled at 2 K was used as a persistent hole-burning material.
The photon-echo memory[1], or the time-domain optical data storage, resembles the hole-burning memory [2] in that the inhomogeneous absorption line of a material is employed as a storage medium and the information is stored in it as a frequency-dependent absorption change with the resolution determined by the homogeneous width. Having the common memory capacity N given by the inhomogeneous-to-homogeneous width ratio, both types of memories share common problems like low-temperature operation, spectral diffusion and so on. Although a storage medium is common, storage techniques are definitely different for the two memories. The photon-echo memory utilizes the temporal interference effect between a reference pulse and a data pulse and their interference pattern is stored as a population grating in the frequency domain. In this sense this is a time-domain analog of holography where the spatial interference pattern between a reference beam and a data beam is stored in a medium as a population grating in the real space. Like the spatially diffracted beam from the read beam gives the information stored in the hologram, the “temporally diffracted pulse", or the photon echo, after the read pulse can give the information stored in the inhomogeneous distribution.
We demonstrate that accumulated photon echoes can be generated by synchrotron radiation. This is an experiment of a nonlinear optical effect carried out by using the radiation from an electron storage ring. A dye-doped polymer film was excited by the visible light from the storage ring, and the accumulated photon echoes from the sample were observed by employing a phase-modulation technique. The use of synchrotron radiation facilitates the extension of the spectral range where we can observe photon echoes with ultrahigh time resolution.
Time-and-space-domain holography [1,2] by stimulated photon echoes [3] provides a means of storing temporal and spatial properties of an ultrafast-varying light signal and recalling its authentic replica at any later moment. The possibility of recording complex time shapes of light pulses, which also means time-domain optical data storage, is based on the ability of frequency-selective absorbers to store with high accuracy the temporal Fourier components of the incident light [1-3]. The time-domain frequency-selective optical storage of binary or analog data is an alternative approach to the concept of frequency-selective high-density data storage that provides a parallel ultrafast data storage and processing in the frequency domain. The shortest detail of the signal to be stored is limited by the reverse inhomogeneous bandwidth of the storing media which reaches 10-100 fs for frequency-selective materials while the duration of the signal is limited by phase relaxation time T2 (usually 10−9-10−6s).
One important possible application of photon echoes is all-optical data storage. Photon echoes have a number of advantageous properties that make diem very good candidates for such applications, such as high areal density (1 Tb/cm2 has been projected [1], which should be compared with approximately 1 Mb/cm2 for commercially available CMOS memories today) and readout speeds >THz have been experimentally demonstrated [2]. We have addressed the problem of how to selectively erase data bits stored using photon echoes. One solution to this problem is to coherently add a new echo, phase shifted 180 degrees relative to the original echo, and thus achieve selective erasure of data [3].