We discuss thermal fixing as a solution to the volatility problem in hologr
aphic storage systems that use photorefractive materials such as LiNbO3:Fe.
We present a systematic study to characterize the effect of thermal fixing
on the error performance of a large-scale holographic memory. We introduce
a novel, to our knowledge, incremental fixing schedule to improve the over
all system fixing efficiency. We thermally fixed 10,000 holograms in a 90 d
egrees-geometry setup by using this new schedule. All the fixed holograms m
ere retrieved with no errors. (C) 1999 Optical Society of America.