Photon echo memory:principles and applications

Sergey A. Moiseev

Nail Akhmediev

The phenomenon of long-lived photon echo (LPE) has attracted much recent attention [1-6]. This interest stems from the possible application of this phenomenon in high-capacity optical memory devices (OMD) [7-8]. At present many fundamental problems crucial to the construction of an operating device are solved. The possibility of multiple information read out without refresh is shown theoretically [9] and experimentally [5,10]. Resonant media with storage times of the order of tens of hours and more have been investigated [4,5].Nevertheless, up to now it has not been clear whether it is possible to selectively erase information in an arbitrary memory cell of OMD. It was pointed out for the first time in Ref. [ 11] that it is in principle possible to erase information with random access using LPE signal suppression. We investigate the effect of LPE signal suppression in this work in more detail, and propose a simple technique for random access information erasing.

В. В. Самарцев, В. А. Зуйков, L. A. Nefedev

V. V. Samartsev

The physics of the long-lived photon echo and the physical principles of the functioning of the optical phase memory, based on this phenomenon, are considered. The principal schemes of the optical echo-processors are discussed. The modem state ofthe elaboration ofthese processors is analyzed. Key words: photon echo, echo-processors, optical memory, phase, and relaxation. 1.1NTRODUCTION Photon (light) echo was predicted in 1963 in Kazan Physical and Technical Institute of RAS by Kopvillem and

В. А. Зуйков, I. I. Popov, Tatiana G. Mitrofanova +1 more

M. Belov, Edward A. Manykin

A physical principle of the associative-memory optical implementation by using the photon-echo effect is proposed. The properties inherent in this phenomenon permit an optical scheme similar to the nonlinear holographic associative memory [Appl. Opt. 26, 1900 (1987)] to be considered. The associative-memory system based on the photon-echo effect uses a temporal selectivity instead of a spatial one.