9618891 Fiddy Optical storage in photorefractives is now the focus of a large national effort, through PRISM (Photorefractive Information Storage Materials consortium). One of the major problems in using volume storage media that they face is that of selective fixing and erasing. The PI's are of the opinion that a straightforward method to achieve these requirements is possible using the much more readily available material of lithium niobate. They propose to show that one can optically address doped lithium niobate in such a way that one can locally heat a small volume interior to the crystal, while writing simultaneously the information to be stored. Such an approach assumes local storage of information holographically, thereby minimizing the cross-talk between the set of "pages" written in one volume as they are written and read through adjacent volumes. A laser induced heating effect allows for non-mechanical beam steering, which is another desirable attribute of volume storage media. In order to demonstrate the principle of this idea, we would first use an inexpensive and not particularly compact carbon dioxide laser to perform the localized heating. ***
