Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded into 5D optical data storage. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southampton
Scientists at the Uni of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years. Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of 5D digital data by femtosecond laser writing.
The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records.
The technology was first experimentally demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D. Now, major documents from human history such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton’s Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race. A copy of the UDHR encoded to 5D data storage was recently presented to UNESCO by the ORC at the International Year of Light (IYL) closing ceremony in Mexico..
The documents were recorded using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light. The file is written in 3 layers of nanostructured dots separated by 5 micrometres. The self-assembled nanostructures 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.
Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in 5 dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the 3D position of these nanostructures. The team are now looking for industry partners to further develop and commercialise this ground-breaking new technology. http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=161041&CultureCode=en
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