Sustainable data storage in quartz nanostructures

By admin On Feb 15, 2016

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Researchers have developed a way to store and retrieve data in quartz using a femtosecond laser or ultrashort pulse laser. Data stored with the technology should be able to survive ‘billions of years’.

The research group from Southampton, England, already presented the technology in 2013 together with Eindhoven University of Technology. The group has refined the technique in the meantime, and will present the latest findings at a conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 17.

The ‘5d data storage method’ uses an ultra-short pulse laser that stores data on three different layers in the quartz. The information is encoded by polarization differences, which in turn can be read by an optical microscope and a polarization filter. The different axes, or the orientation and size with which the information is stored, are the ‘5-dimensional’ aspect of the method. The small pits or nanodots that represent the bits are spaced 5 micrometers apart. Each nanodot created by the laser is good for 3bit of information.

The glass, or actually quartz, remains stable up to temperatures of 1000 degrees Celsius and hardly decays under normal conditions. It would therefore be a good method to store data for a very long time. The group tested the method in 2013 with a 300kB text file. The group also predicted that a ‘disc’ could store up to 360TB of data, with disc standing for a disc the size of a compact disc.

Several important documents have since been stored in quartz, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Newton’s ‘Opticks’, Magna Carta and the King James Bible. The copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was recently presented to UNESCO in connection with the international Year of Light.

The new paper ‘5D Data Storage by Ultra Fast Laser Writing in Glass’ will be presented next Wednesday during the seventh session of the conference.

Update February 19: made some additions related to the conference itself and clarified that the 360 terabyte prediction is already from 2013.