Optical Erasure Characteristics of Holograms in Batch Thermal-Fixing

The optical erasure dynamics in a batch-thermal fixing scheme of holographic storage in photorefractive crystals is investigated theoretically and experimentally. The inter-batch optical erasure time constant τ_F is introduced to specify the optical erasure to compensated gratings, and measured in a sophisticated experiment. The experimental result shows that τ_F is much longer than the intra-batch optical erasure time constant τ_E. The difference between τ_F and τ_E is fundamental for enhancing nonvolatile storage density.