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posted by hubie on Wednesday October 30, @02:10AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab have developed a new type of optical memory that stores data by transferring light from rare-earth element atoms embedded in a solid material to nearby quantum defects. They published their study in Physical Review Research.

The problem that the researchers aim to solve is the diffraction limit of light in standard CDs and DVDs. Current optical storage has a hard cap on data density because each single bit can't be smaller than the wavelength of the reading/writing laser.

The researchers propose bypassing this limit by stuffing the material with rare-earth emitters, such as magnesium oxide (MgO) crystals. The trick, called wavelength multiplexing, involves having each emitter use a slightly different wavelength of light. They theorized that this would allow cramming far more data into the same storage footprint.

The researchers first had to tackle the physics and model all the requirements to build a proof of concept. They simulated a theoretical solid material filled with rare-earth atoms that absorb and re-emit light. The models then showed how the nearby quantum defects could capture and store the returned light.

One of the fundamental discoveries was that when a defect absorbs the narrow wavelength energy from those nearby atoms, it doesn't just get excited – its spin state flips. Once it flips, it is nearly impossible to revert, meaning those defects could legitimately store data for a long time.

While it's a promising first step, some crucial questions still need answers. For example, verifying how long those excited states persist is essential. Details were also light on capacity estimates – the scientists touted "ultra-high-density" but didn't provide any projections against current disc capacities. Yet, despite the remaining hurdles, the researchers are hyped, calling it a "huge first step."

Of course, turning all this into an actual commercial storage product will likely take years of additional research and development.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday October 30, @07:27AM

    by ShovelOperator1 (18058) on Wednesday October 30, @07:27AM (#1379410)

    There was a way to bypass the limit with wavelength - add more detectors for detecting more angles and introduce multi-depth pits. This was called ML-ROM and was developed in late 90s by, as I recall, Philips, Optex, TDK and Calimetrics, it was shown in early 2000s when they "blown" the CD to 2GB.
    There are two problems:
    First, there may be no market. Optical media, while these early ones were really long-living (I have a recorded CD from 1996 which still reads very well), became subject to various savings making them cheaper (...than MD, which was initially predicted to be the computer's recordable media as CDs were expensive) but also shortening their lifespan. Currently it's hard to get a disc that will hold for decade. For some data even hard drives become more feasible.
    Second, there is a global need for some data to not be stored for a long time. Notice these all attacks to the IA, the global adoption of ephemeral cloud drives or even mail accounts for storing everything, and preferring media streaming which is losing its contents even now. Notice that people now want to delete knowledge they shared when the commercial Internet was the free Cyberspace. Most of the "civilized and democratic" countries have banned books list. We are not so distant from issuing government licenses for large data storage.
    So, another interesting technology may emerge, but it will probably be left not used.

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