Swept-carrier time-domain optical memory.

A new time-domain approach to frequency-selective optical data storage is described. In this approach, a spatial storage cell is exposed to two cotemporal, spatially angled, frequency-chirped excitation fields whose duration can greatly exceed the homogeneous dephasing time of the storage material employed. The two beams have a fixed frequency offset, and one is temporally encoded with data. The new method averts several of the drawbacks of existing approaches to time- and frequency-domain optical memories.