Electrically tunable diffuser for holographic multiplexing storage

Abstract

A polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) device is fabricated to serve as a diffuser for random phase encoding of reference beams in holographic storage system. By tuning the applied voltage on the PDLC device, three individual random phase reference waves which are orthogonal to each other can be generated. Therefore, holographic multiplexing scheme can be performed using voltage modulation on the PDLC diffuser. In addition, shift multiplexing technique still can be performed in the storage system. When compared with conventional shift multiplexing, using electrically tunable PDLC diffuser offers additional multiplexing mechanism in the presented technique. Using the proposed PDLC diffuser, the multiplexing numbers can be enhanced three times owing to voltage modulation. A holographic storage system implemented using shift multiplexing and voltage modulation on PDLC diffuser is demonstrated. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.