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from the what-if-the-readers-are-only-good-for-ONE-billion-years? dept.
Researchers at the UK's Southampton University have created a storage scheme that could supposedly store hundreds of terabytes for billions of years:
Researchers, led by Martynas Beresna, in the university's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have built five-dimensional photonic structures in nano-structured fuzed quartz glass with femtosecond pulses of light; meaning one quadrillionth (one millionth of one billionth) of a second. Data is written in three layers of nano-structured dots, voxels, separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre).
A voxel is an optical vortex, a polarisation vortex using nano-gratings, and a paper by the researchers, "Radially polarized optical vortex converter created by femtosecond laser nanostructuring of glass" (pdf), explains how they: "...demonstrate a polarization vortex converter, which produces radially or azimuthally polarized visible vortices from a circularly polarized beam, using femtosecond laser imprinting of space-variant self-assembled form birefringence in silica glass."
When the femtolaser pulse hits the glass it causes polarisation vortices to be created which change the way light passes through the glass, modifying its polarisation. This polarisation can be detected using a combined optical microscope and polariser. The dimensions of the three-layered nano-structured dot voxel are length, width, depth, size and orientation.
We're told an optical disk, using this technology, could hold 360TB of data for 13.8 billion years at 190°C, meaning a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature. [...] Altechna, a Lithuanian laser optics company, is working on commercialising the technology.
This story is a bit of a throwback since the researchers originally published these claims back in 2013. However they are presenting their results under the title "Eternal 5D data storage by ultrafast laser writing in glass" on February 17, 2016 at the SPIE Photonics West 2016 conference in San Francisco.
5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2016, @08:56AM
A voxel is an optical vortex
No, a Voxel is a volumetric pixel. A pixel is a picture element. I've done voxel imaging in the medical field. It's a 3D pixel... A pixel with volume. You don't get to change the name we've been using for decades. What you're talking about is a Hoxel. Holographic Pixel. Holograms have the property of representing N-dimensional data in a N-x dimensional space. Like representing 5D data in 3D material, or 3D images in 2D holographic film, or drawing 2D images on a spool of single dimensional thread, etc. However, the Hoxel sounds too much like Hoaxel, and "voxel" is a buzz word in 3D graphics (mostly used incorrectly). Most people mean volumetric space partitioning when they say "voxel" in graphics. Like in Minecraft: it's not a voxel engine. A Voxels doesn't have different "sides" so you wouldn't have panes of glass in Minecraft if it was really a voxel engine.
Volumetric data is typically represented as cubes, or point clouds, but can be packed spheres or triangular particles (my favorite, cheapest to render, and can "link" up if you alternate their orientation -- Just apply a normal vector that's the average of the aproximate bounding surface, and unless you zoom in real close you won't be able to tell the 3D MRI image is actually being drawn with triangular pixels, Trixels... (No Phil Fish, your "trixel" engine isn't using trixels, those are orthogonally rendered uniformly partitioned spaces, like a cube map, with a quad-tree collision detection system that ignores the current Z (in out) direction).
Each volumetric unit would be the same uniform value at a given resolution in a voxel -- Pixels don't have "edges", Voxels don't have "sides". Each Voxel is a uniform volume at a regular fixed interval of resolution, like a pixel... Not a "vortex". Holographic storage might only be considered a voxel if you're a higher dimensional being, but the key word here is holographic rather than volumetric.