| Elena Korchemskaya1, Dmitry Stepanchikov2, and Tatyana Dyukova3
1Institute of Physics, National Academy of Sciences, 46 Prospect Nauki, Kiev, 03039 Ukraine,
e-mail: tdyukova@mail.iteb.ru |
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Bacteriorhodopsin (BR) is an excellent candidate for the use in the field of information technologies due to its long-term stability and unique photochromic and photorefractive properties. Various manipulations with chemical environment of BR and/or its hydration level along with genetic modifications in the molecule may be the tools for the design of novel media with desired performance.
The potentialities for the use of photoinduced anisotropy in chemically modified BR films based on both BR570 and M410 states of the photocycle for nonlinear spatial light modulation are demonstrated. It is shown that films with chemically modified BR exhibit a 6-fold increase of the photoanisotropic response, 100-fold growth in photosensitivity and lesser values of a residual absorption at around 633 nm.
We have attempted to demonstrate the potentialities for the use of B-M-type anisotropy for the edge enhancement and the real-time selective blocking of an image feature having a particular intensity. The photoanisotropic incoherent-to-coherent optical conversion of a white-light-illuminated image with concurrent spatial-intensity modulation is also demonstrated in the BR films.
This work was in part supported by grant UB2-2427-KV-02 from the CRDF (to E.K. and D.S.) and grant 01-04-48198a from the RFBR (to T.D.).
