polymers and holographic data storage

Data recordable media has to advance to meet rapidly growing demand. Holotech information storage has a quantity of unique characteristics contrasting with traditional storage technologies. For example, it can save information at densities that are 10 or 100 times more than those possible with magnetic information storage. Numerous holograms, each holding nearly a megabyte of information, can be recorded permeating the volume of the recordable media by changing the angle or wave phase of the reference beam. Polymers have the potential to make high-performance holotechnology storage media. These include organic photorefractive substances and photo-addressable polymers. On the other hand, photopolymers may shrink. One approach to solve the shrinkage issue is to have media with two polymer slices -- one providing structural support and a second to record the holograms. For different useful information regarding this, please see CFC International .

Projecting a reference ray on hologaphically encoded photosensitive material with the same angle and wavelength used to engrave the original hologram causes refraction within the storage material and recreates the holotechnology picture or recorded data. The holographic picture appears three dimensionally because of the motion parallax. For information retrieval, the patterns of light and darkness from the recreated picture are retranslated into electronic data with a Detector Array (DA). Data retrieval is extraordinarily rapid, often recreating an entire (million-bit) page at a time. The site on Virtual Reality and Veterinary Medicine reports novel developments on this topic.

Holographic DVDs provides expanded discussion.