Automatic Event Recognition Employing Optically Excited Electro-Nuclear Spin Coherence

An analog automatic event recognition (AER) system can be realized by combining the technique of holographic image recognition with the process of temporal signal correlation employing stimulated photon echo in an ensemble of two-level atoms. For efficient operation of the AER system, the optical transition in the two-level system must have a large oscillator strength. However, this implies a rapid decay of the excited state, which highly constrains the duration of the event that can be recognized, even when the images are retrieved rapidly from a fast parallel optical memory device. This constraint can be overcome by using a three-level Lambda system to transfer optical coherence to long-lived electro-nuclear spin coherence and vice-versa. Here, we present an analysis of the AER process employing such a Lambda system. We also show that due to the longitudinal and transverse variation of the phases of the optical fields undergoing Fresnel diffraction, the density matrix equations must account for the differences in the phases of the coherence excited in each pixel and the corresponding phases of the optical fields in subsequent pulses.