Real-Time Aero-Optic Flow Visualization Using the Erasable Material Bacteriorhodopsin

Bacteriorhodopsin is a new, high speed, erasable, dynamic hologrphic recording material that is an ideal candidate for creating successive multiple holographic exposures in flow visualization. Bacteriorhodopsin is an organic photochromic material, sensitive to sing photon stimulation with picosecond response times. Conventional holographic aero-optic instrumentation has been extremely limited until now by the one-shot nature of silver halide materials. This has limited data taking to either a highly time- resolved single "slice" of data, or to time-averaged analysis, neither of which gives invormation on the time development of the flow systems. It is proposed to study the potential of using bacteriorhodopsin to create interferometric "movies" to alleviate this difficulty. With its high speed recording capabilities, its high resolution, and its erasability, bacteriorhodopsin has the potential of superseding technology that is already 20 years old. It can be easily integrated into holography systems in place of silver halide materials, with very little change in the experimental set-up. Bacteriorhodopsin has already proven useful in such contexts as: Fourier transform holography, pattern recognition architectures, and 3-D optical memories.