Abstract

Photorefractive fiber has a unique property of both the bulk crystal materials and the fibers. We propose using a bundle of single crystal fibers to replace a large volume of bulk material, for which a large amount of information can be stored in the bundle. In experiments, we have shown that an array of spatial information can be launched into the bundle of photorefractive fibers by using an array of lenses. Since the overall space-bandwidth product of the bundle is proportional to the number of fibers, the storage capacity can be increased to N times, where N is the number of fibers. It is well known that by spatial multiplexing of the fiber proportional to the numerical aperture of the fiber, the number of multiplexed channels in the bundle will be increased by a factor of $\sqrt{\text{N}}$. We have also shown that the effects of cross talk among the fibers can be avoided in the bundle, as compared with the bulk crystal.

© 1992 Optical Society of America