Ultra-High Density Spectral Storage Materials.

摘要

This report deals with the development of solid-state materials for ultra-dense spectral storage. Being atomic scale storage, spectral storage has the potential of providing orders of magnitude denser memories than present day memories that depend on the hulk properties of the storage medium. Atomic and bulk properties of rare earth doped wide band gap semiconductors, particularly alkaline earth sulfides, have been tailored and a novel storage techniques, power-gated holeburning, has been devised. It has been demonstrated that this combination of materials and method of storage allows for ultra-dense, fast, persistent, and rewriteable spectral memories. The improvement in performance parameters has been by orders of magnitude, and more importantly, all favorable characteristics of spectral storage have been combined in a single material, Magnesium Sulfide doped with Europium. It has been demonstrated that with the exception of low temperature operation, the performance of this materials matches or exceeds the standards of current commercial memories. On the basis of these investigations, it is apparent that almost all barriers to a commercially viable device based on spectral holeburning can be removed. Recommendations have been made for future research to increase the temperature of operation and to extend the range of spectral memories into the infrared.