Eternal 5D data
storage
(February 18, 2016) Scientists
at the University 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 five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser
writing.
The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360
TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C 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.
Universal
Declaration of Human Rights recorded into 5D optical data
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 three
layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a
metre).
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 five dimensions: the size and orientation
in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.