Regeneration of photon echoes with amplified photon echoes

Abstract

Photon-echo-based devices have been proposed for many applications in data storage, image processing, and optical communications. Many of these applications would benefit if the output from the photon-echo process could be used as input in a second photon-echo process. We demonstrate the generation of such secondary echoes, using the amplified output from an initial photon-echo process. The amplification is performed with a Pr:ZBLAN fiber amplifier, which gives a gain of more than 300 at 606 nm when pumped with 320 mW of power at 476 nm.