Abstract

The recently growing interest in photon-gated persistent spectral hole burning(PHB) spectroscopy is due partly to the possibilities of nondestructive reading[1] and extremely high sensitivity in the detection of subtle perturbations under external fields[2]. The mechanisms of reported photon-gated PHB systems have two-step photoionization[3], two-step photo-decom position[4], two-color sensitization reaction via triplet-triplet energy transfer[5] and photon induced donor-acceptor electron transfer) DA-ET) reactions[1]. The triplet bottleneck effect[6] may be overcome by using photon-gated PHB to produce detectable holes after a short irradiation time, the successful observations of PHB on a nanosecond time scale in several photon-gated DA-ET system [1,7] demonstrated more applicability in ultrahigh density optical storage, considering both the per formance of these reported systems and the variety of DA combinations, further efforts to find systems with optimum storage properties and to make the PHB mechanism clearer should be very rewarding.

© 1994 Optical Society of America