NSF Award
9761611
*** 9761611 Smithey This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is directed toward development of new optical materials that are robust, reusable, and inexpensive and have optical properties superior to those of current materials. The required properties for a competitive, economically viable material are good light Sensitivity, large change in a material property (e.g., absorbance or refractive index) upon exposure to light, read-without-erase capability, long recording lifetime, fatigue resistance, and erasability. Current materials - e.g., photopolymers and phase-change materials not satisfy all of these requirements. The approach will be to alter a novel biological material, bacteriorhodopsin (BR), to meet the sensitivity requirements for optical-recording materials. In previous work, Bend Research and others have demonstrated the potential of BR for optical recording and have shown it meets all of the other necessary material requirements. Improvements in the sensitivity of BR materials is the key advance remaining to be achieved in the development of a practical BR-based optical-recording material for a wide range of applications. Development of a BR material with improved sensitivity would enable product development for many large markets, including optical correlation, pattern recognition, optical-data storage, fingerprint identification, neural networks, and multimedia storage. ***
