Two-photon photobleaching of an ordered 3-D polymer nanocomposite: a candidate for high density 3-D optical memory

Summary form only given. The ever increasing data storage requirements of computer technology has lead many researchers to investigate a variety of three dimensional (3-D) optical memory schemes. Optical data storage in 3-D has the important advantage that bit storage density scales as 1//spl lambda//sup 3/ compared to 1//spl lambda//sup 2/ for 2-D optical memories, which potentially allows for bit densities in excess of 10/sup 12/ bits/cm/sup 3/ in 3-D media. In this work we report on the application of a novel polymer nanocomposite to the task of 3-D optical data storage. The nanocomposite has a 3-D hexagonal closed packed structure of "hard" PMMA core particles embedded in a matrix of (methyl)methacrylate(MMA)-(butyl)methacrylate(BMA) copolymer. The cores are functionalized by cross-linking a fluorescent dye randomly on the PMMA polymer chain.