Demonstration of highly efficient photon echoes in absorbing media

Summary form only given. Coherent transients maybe used in a variety of information storage and processing applications with advantages over traditional electronic methods. Recently, it was demonstrated through numerical simulations that highly efficient wave form recall was possible in absorbing media with proper choice of absorption length and brief pulse area. We report experimental results in which greater than 150% waveform recall efficiency was achieved with excellent signal fidelity. In the experiment laser pulses were propagated through a Tm:YAG crystal with an absorption length of 2.8, held at 4.6 K.