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Photorefractive Effects, Materials, and Devices

All-Optical Associative Memory using a Saturable Absorber and Photorefractive Crystals

M. Duelli, Roger Sean Cudney, C. Keller, Peter Günter

Published Jan 1, 1993• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

An associative memory is a storage device in which an input set of data recalls another set of associated data. In particular, it has the property that an incomplete or distorted set can be used to retrieve the complete and correct version of a set of data that is most similar to the input.
DOI
10.1364/pmed.1993.frg.9

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Associative optical memories have attracted increasing interest as they can offer new, all-optical solutions to various problems, for example in pattern recognition. In such memories, stored informations are retrieved from partial or noisy inputs. An optical laser resonator can act as such an associative processor. Using holograms, different images are associated to each of the modes of the optical cavity. Thus a partial input image can force the resonator to oscillate on the closest stored information. Two wave mixing arrangements in photorefractive crystals, which provide very large amplification factors, can be used to overcome the large losses inherent to these resonators.
A new implementation of an all-optical associative memory is presented. It is realized in a nonresonant cavity containing a photorefractive and a nematic liquid crystal. The images, which are stored on slides, modulate the intensities of the signal beams circulating in the cavity. In a photorefractive KNbO3 crystal the signal images are compared with an arbitrary input image on the pump beam by multiple two-beam coupling. In the nematic liquid-crystal cell the signal images are thresholded by a feedback-induced optical bistability. Associative readout, error correction, and image completion are demonstrated for two and three stored black-and-white images. The performance of the new scheme is estimated to be comparable with that of nonlinear holographic associative memories based on thin holograms.
One can construct a memory having associative characteristics using optical resonators with an internal gain medium. The device operates on the principle that an optical resonator employing a holographic grating can have user prescribed eigenmodes. Information that is to be recalled is contained in the hologram. Each information entity (e.g. an image of a cat) defines an eigenmode of the resonator. The stored information is accessed by injecting partial information (e.g. an image of the cat's ear) into the resonator. The appropriate eigenmode is selected through a competitive process in a gain medium placed inside the resonator. With a net gain greater than one, the gain amplifies the field belonging to the eigenmode that most resembles the injected field; the other eigenmodes are suppressed via the competition for the gain. One can expect this device to display several intriguing features such as recall transitions and creativity. I will discuss some of the general properties of this class of devices and present the results from a series of experiments with a simple holographic resonator employing photorefractive gain.
The speed of modern supercomputers is primarily limited by the relatively slow speed of memory. Research over the past years has focused on developing optical memory systems that, by nature of optics, promise to achieve high speed and high memory capacity. Three- dimensional optical memory systems are well known for their storage capacity and achievable short access time. But the early attempts to exploit 3-dimensional media were limited to photorefractive crystals such as lithium niobate, due to the unavailability of any other suitable medium (alternative media are precluded by their diffraction limited storage densities and non- erasable characteristics). Although volume phase holograms can be recorded in photorefractive crystals, these materials have many obvious flaws such as strong scattering, phase distortion, self diffraction, fast decay, and low refractive index modulation. There have also been continuous efforts to develop new 3-D media (such as photon echo, photorefractive polymers, bacteriorhodusphin, memory access cache, etc., but none can be applied in real world 3-D device because these materials are still in the early stage of development.