Compensation of hologram distortion by controlling defocus component in reference beam wavefront for angle multiplexed holograms

Abstract

Holographic memory has the potential to function as a recording system with a large capacity and high data-transfer-rate. Photopolymer materials are typically used as a write-once recording medium. When holograms are recorded on this medium, they can distort due to shrinkage or expansion of the materials, which degrades the reconstructed image and causes a higher bit error rate (bER) of the reproduced data. We propose optically compensating for hologram distortion by controlling aberration components in the reference beam wavefront while reproducing data, thereby improving the reproduced data quality. First, we investigated the relation between each aberration component of the reference beam and the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the reproduced data using numerical simulation and found that horizontal tilt and the defocus component affect the SNR. Next, we experimentally evaluated the reproduced data by controlling the defocus component in the reference beam and found that the bER of the reproduced data could be decreased by controlling the defocus center with respect to the hologram position and phase modulation depth of the defocus component. Then, we investigated a practical control method of the defocus component using an evaluation value similar to the definition of the SNR for actual data reproduction from holograms. Using a defocus controlled wavefront enabled us to decrease the bER from 3.54 × 10−3 with a plane wave to 3.14 × 10−4. We also investigated how to reduce the bERs of reproduced data in angle multiplexed holograms. By using a defocus controlled wavefront to compensate for hologram distortion on the 40th data page in 80-page angle multiplexed holograms, the bERs of all pages could be decreased to less than 1 ×10−3. We showed that controlling the defocus component is an effective way to compensate for hologram distortion and to decrease the bER of reproduced data in holographic memory.