Digital Light Deflection

It is desirable to substitute a light beam for the electron beam used in the class of devices of which the flying spot scanner and the Williams tube are examples. In this class of devices the electron beam is used to probe a suitable target and read or store information on it. The substitution is desirable because a light beam has negligible inertia and can, in principle, be deflected rapidly. The subject of this paper*' f- % is a new * The contents of this paper were discussed by the author at the Twenty-First Annual Conference on Electron Device Research ( I E E E ) , Salt Lake City, U t a h , June 26-28, 1963. f A brief description of methods t h a t can be used to deflect a light beam is given by U. J. Schmidt (Schmidt, U. J . , The Problem of Light Beam Deflection at High Frequencies, Proceedings of the Symposium on Optical Processing of Information, ed. Pollack, D. K., Koester, C. J . , and T i p p e t t , J. T . , Spartan Books, Inc., Baltimore, 1963, p . 98). t Note Added in Proof. An article on some aspects of digital light deflection has recently appeared in the literature: see Kulcke, W., Harris, T. J . , Kosanke, K., and Max, E . , IBM Journal of Research and Development, 8, 1964, pp. 64-67. 821