Heat-assisted ferroelectric reading for high-speed ferroelectric probe data storage

We propose a heat-assisted ferroelectric reading method that increases read speed while maintaining the polarization retention characteristics of ultrahigh-density ferroelectric data storage, namely, scanning nonlinear dielectric microscopy (SNDM) probe memory. This is achieved by locally heating the ferroelectric recording medium for a very short time at the data reading position using laser irradiation. We discuss the relationship between the maximum number of laser irradiation cycles and the heating duration for a LiTaO3 medium. We also conduct a basic experiment and confirm that laser pulse irradiation greatly increases SNDM signal strength. Furthermore, we experimentally confirm that high-speed SNDM signal amplification occurs with nanosecond-order light irradiation. The proposed method may overcome the fundamental problems of next-generation ultrahigh-density ferroelectric data storage.