Content-addressable data storage by use of volume holograms

Data stored as volume holograms-optical interference patterns imprinted int o a photosensitive storage material-can be accessed both by address and by content. An optical correlation-based search compares each input query agai nst all stored records simultaneously, a massively parallel but inherently noisy analog process. With data encoding and signal postprocessing we demon strate a holographic content-addressable data-storage system that searches digital data with high search fidelity. (C) 1999 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 200.4540, 210.2860.