Researchers have created an optical disc capable for storing a petabit of information – that’s the equivalent of 125 000GB of data!
Popular Science reported that for encoding data, “optical discs almost always offer just a single, 2D layer — that reflective, silver underside. If you could boost a disc’s number of available encodable layers, however, you could hypothetically gain a massive amount of extra space.”
Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently set out to do just that, and published the results earlier this week in the journal Nature.
Using a 54-nanometre laser, the team managed to record 100 layers of data onto an optical disc, with each tier separated by just one micrometre.
The final result is an optical disc with a 3D stack of data layers capable of holding a whopping 125TB of data.
As Gizmodo offers for reference, that same petabit of information requires roughly a 2m tall stack of hard disk drives — if you tried to encode the same amount of data onto Blu-ray discs, you’d need around 10 000 to complete your challenge.
To pull off their accomplishment, the scientists needed to create an entirely new material for their optical disc’s film.
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AIE-DDPR film utilises a combination of specialised, photosensitive molecules capable of absorbing photonic data at a nanoscale level, which is then encoded using a hi-tech dual-laser array.
3D ‘box’
Because AIE-DDPR is incredibly transparent, designers could apply layer-upon-layer to an optical disk without worrying about degrading the overall data. This basically generated a 3D “box” for digitised information, thus exponentially raising the disc’s capacity. — (c) 2024 NewsCentral Media