University of Southampton stores 360Tbyte in quartz in 5D

In the experiment at Southampton, a 300kbit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light. The file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre).

The process involved recording digital data using femtosecond laser writing on nanostructures created in fused quartz, which is able to store vast quantities of data.

The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

The researchers used self-assembled nanostructures which change the way light travels through glass, modifying polarisation of light that can then be read by combination of optical microscope and a polariser, similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.

The research is led by the ORC researcher Jingyu Zhang and conducted under a joint project with Eindhoven University of Technology.

“We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” said Jingyu.

“Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit.”

The Physical Optics group from the ORC presented their paper at the photonics industry’s renowned Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO’13) in San Jose.

The paper, ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass’ was presented by the during CLEO’s prestigious post deadline session.

Richard Wilson