Effects of cross talk on fidelity in page-oriented volume holographic optical data storage

Abstract

Using numerical simulation, we quantitatively examine the effects of cross talk on the recall fidelity of stored binary data in a page-oriented volume holographic memory system. We discuss the trade-off between the signal-to-noise ratio of the reconstructed bits and the optical throughput of the system (i.e., the fraction of the incident beam that is diffracted to the detector plane). We show that significant gains in the signal-to-noise ratio can be achieved with modest decreases in optical throughput in the region where the highest throughput occurs. The magnitude of this trade-off is influenced by both beam degeneracy and coherent recording cross talk. At low optical throughputs an upper limit to the signal-to-noise ratio is set by the cross talk caused by angular sidelobe overlap, which in turn is a function of the angular isolation of the angularly multiplexed data pages.