Frequency Domain Optical Storage and Other Applications of Persistent Spectral Hole-Burning

摘要

The previous chapters have described the fundamental physical and chemical changes that can lead to the formation of persistent spectral holes in inhomogeneously broadened optical or infrared transitions in solids at low temperatures. Persistent spectral hole-burning (PSHB) has proven to be a powerful tool for high-resolution spectroscopy of impurities in solids that can be used to study dephasing mechanisms, microenvironments in crystals, amorphous host dynamics, low-temperature solid-state photochemistry, and microscopic perturbations due to external fields. At the same time, PSHB has the potential for technological applications to optical data storage, pulse shaping, and optical signal processing. This has resulted in engineering and materials research on PSHB at a variety of laboratories around the world. In this chapter, several potential technological applications of persistent spectral hole-burning will be reviewed. The application that has received the most attention so far is based on the concept of using persistent spectral hole-burning to form a frequency domain optical storage (FDOS) system. In FDOS, the optical freqeuency or wavelength at which holes are burned is used to encode digital information where, for instance, the presence of a hole at a particular optical frequency may be used to encode a digital 1 and the absence of a hole a digital 0.