Dime-Size Novels or more than three decades, scientists have dreamed of exploiting holography as a means of storing and retrieving information. But with increasing pressure to make computers faster, smaller and more efficient, the search has been renewed. The awesome capacity of holographic storage is also evident in how the data is measured. Computer information is expressed in bits, whereas holographic data is termed pages, with each page containing 100,000 bits or more. There's no perfect material at the moment.
Various materials have advantages and disadvantages.
There are tradeoffs involved with sensitivity, storage lifetime and the ultimate maximum data capacity. Gaylord, along with EE Professor Elias Glytsis, is placing holograms inside crystals of lithium niobate in an effort to understand how one hologram affects another, and how stable the information remains over time. Like light passing through a picture slide, the pattern is projected into the crystal. Subsequent pages are added by moving the reference beam to a slightly different angle. To retrieve a page, the reference beam is aimed at the crystal at precisely the same angle used to store the information.