Abstract
SEVERAL classes of organic materials (such as photoanisotropic liquid-crystalline polymers1–4 and photorefractive polymers5–7) are being investigated for the development of media for optical data storage. Here we describe a new family of organic materials—peptide oligomers containing azobenzene chromophores— which appear particularly promising for erasable holographic data storage applications. The rationale for our approach is to use the structural properties of peptide-like molecules to impose orientational order on the chromophores, and thereby optimize the optical properties of the resulting materials. Here we show that holographic gratings with large first-order diffraction efficiencies (up to 80%) can be written and erased optically in oligomer films only a few micrometres thick. The holograms also exhibit good thermal stability, and are not erased after heating to 180 °C for one month. Straightforward extension of this peptide-based strategy to other molecular structures should allow the rational design of a wide range of organic materials with potentially useful optical properties.
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Berg, R., Hvilsted, S. & Ramanujam, P. Peptide oligomers for holographic data storage. Nature 383, 505–508 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1038/383505a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/383505a0
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