A new material could eventually be used to store

vast amounts of data on a disc.

A new light-responsive material could lead to discs the size of todays DVDs that
store four orders of magnitude more data. Traditional DVDs and CDs store data on
their surface in two dimensions, and holographic discs can store it in three. Now
researchers have for the first time demonstrated what they call a five-dimensional
optical material. It can record data in three spatial dimensions and in response to
different wavelengths and polarizations of laser light.
The material is being developed by researchers led by Min Gu, director of
the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology in
Victoria, Australia. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in
clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns can be written
and read within the same area in the material without interfering with each other.
Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers
have written six different patterns within the same area. Theyve further increased
the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks
of as many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the
journalNature, Gus group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit per second.
You can record each bit by one laser pulse, says Gu. The writing laser melts and
reshapes the gold particles, which are less than 100 nanometers long. The changes
affect how the nanorods interact with light from a laser-imaging system, allowing
the data to be read.
The Australian researchers tailored the gold nanoparticles to respond to different
wavelengths of light by controlling their dimensions. When pulsed with a focused
beam of green light, for example, some of the nanorods will change shape, while
others very close by but of a different size will not be affected. The response of the
nanorods, which are scattered throughout the plastic randomly, also depends on the
angle of propagation of the incoming light. When the polarization of the light is
aligned with the rods long axis, the rods absorb it more strongly than they do light
coming from other angles. The patterns cant be erased and rewritten, but they
should be stable over time.
Previous work on this kind of multiplexed optical storage relied on light-responsive
polymers. The absoption spectrum of those materials is very broad, says Gu,
which makes it difficult to record at high density using multiple colors of light. The
advantage of the gold nanorods and of quantum dots, another nanomaterial Gu is
exploring for rewritable five-dimensional storage, is that they respond to much
narrower bands of light.
The Australian technique will have to compete against a range of high-density datastorage techniques in various stages of development, including flash and nextgeneration high-density magnetic storage. The results are early but interesting,
says Kevin Curtis, the chief technology officer at InPhase Technologies, a Colorado
company thats developing holographic storage, which records in three dimensions
using one wavelength. Last week at the IEEE Photonics Societys optical data

storage meeting in Florida, InPhase presented a prototype that stores 713

gigabytes per square inch. The company is working with Hitachi to implement the
holographic technology in products.
Barry H. Schechtman, executive director emeritus of the Information Storage
Industry Consortium , says the Australian work is a good first demonstration of the
long-term potential of five-dimensional recording to increase optical storage
capacity and rates. The gold nanorod recording medium provides more knobs to
turn than other materials for data storage, he says.
However, Schechtman cautions that the researchers face a tremendous engineering
challenge. Its likely that combining all these variables at once and pushing each
toward its natural limits will prove difficult, he says.
Gu reports that he has an agreement with Samsung and is in discussions with
Chinese electronics manufacturer Shenzhen Sunland Technology to license the
technology. The first application, he says, is likely to be in archives where large
amounts of data from medical imaging files, security encoding, and banking are
stored.