Holographic data storage has come into the spotlight as promising next-generation optical data storage technique with high capacity. Photopolymer is a strong candidate of recording material for volumetric hologram due to high sensitivity and large refractive index modulation.
Although many groups have carried out researches on photopolymer system to get better performance, there has been not any special research about shelf-life time. Shelf-life is one of essential requirements of storage medium to be commercial product. In this report, we present the effects of monomer stabilizer on shelf-life of photopolymer medium. The aim of this study is to improve shelf-life time of photopolymer by addition of monomer stabilizer suppressing unexpected dark reaction without beam exposure.
Photopolymer system used in our study consists of epoxy resin, amine hardener and polymerizable acrylate monomer. A polymeric matrix is formed by in-situ curing of epoxy resin and amine hardener at room temperature, however, monomer remains unreacted. Holographic gratings were recorded in the photopolymer film by intersecting two mutually coherent beams with wavelength of 405nm and p-polarization.