Fast burning of persistent spectral holes in small laser spots using photon-gated materials

We report extremely fast (30 ns) burning of detectable persistent spectral holes in 200-μm-diam laser spots using a new photon-gated donor-acceptor material: a derivative of zinc-tetrabenzoporphyrin as a donor with chloroform acceptors in a poly(methylmethacrylate) thin film. The fast burning pulse near 630 nm was accompanied by a 200-ms gating pulse at 488 nm to produce the ≅1% deep spectral holes in transmission. This result illustrates one crucial advantage of photon-gated materials over single-photon materials: greatly increased reading fluences can be tolerated, allowing fast burning in small laser spots to be easily detected.