A major driver for the development of holographic photopolymers was the concept of optically storing data in a 3D volume.  The traditional approach to this problem was to spatially modulate a laser beam with an image of ~one million bits, record a hologram of this image, then use Bragg selectivity to record subsequent images at the same location to achive storage densities as high as several Tbit/square inch. Starting while at a Silicon Valley startup, Siros Technologies, we explored an alternative approach extnending current optical disk technologies.  Here, a spinning disk is written and read by a focused beam and data is represented by isolated "micro-holograms." These are tiny (several microns cubed) volumes of Bragg retroreflectors written by the interference of the write laser focus and a retroreflected copy.  The disk, which is moving at tens of meters per second, records these nanosecond exposures as bright retroreflecting bits. 

The team

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