Novel biphotonic holographic storage in a side-chain liquid crystalline polyester

Abstract

We report novel biphotonic holographic storage of text and gratings on unoriented films of a side-chain liquid crystalline polyester capable of high density storage and complete erasure. The holograms have a typical size of 1 mm. The recording utilizes unusual photochemistry involving azo dye molecules. We believe that this technique would have a great potential in the recording of thousands of holograms in a two-dimensional plane, as for instance in text retrieval systems and in the fabrication of high density interconnects in optical neural networks.