Two-Photon 3D Optical Data Storage via Aggregate Switching of Excimer-Form ing Dyes

摘要

Current optical data storage (ODS) technologies use one-photon-absorption processes to write data by locally changing the optical properties of the medium.'1'2' Since the lateral dimensions of spots that can be written are near the diffraction limit, significant capacity increases require new approaches such as storage in three dimensions. DVDs, which comprise up to four individually addressable storage layers, exemplify the potential of this concept, but the complexity of producing and using multilayer systems increases with the number of layers. In bulk materials, changes can be confined in the third dimension via nonlinear optical processes, such as two-photon absorption (TPA).~[3-6] We have developed a novel ODS system that relies on the optically-induced switching of the aggregation state and fluorescence of a TPA dye in a polymer matrix. Well-defined, ～3×3×6 μm-large voxels were written with single focused laser pulses and read by confocal laser scanning microscopy. Such ODS systems are easily produced and promise a storage capacity of up to several Tbytes on a DVD-size disk, which is ~100x higher than that of current commercial ODS technologies.~[6,7]