Is This Glass Square the Long, Long Future of Data Storage ?
AnonTechie writes:
Scientists at Microsoft Research in the United States have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books' worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square. In a paper published today in Nature, the researchers say their tests suggest the data will be readable for more than 10,000 years.
What tiny pulses of light can do:
The new system, called Silica, uses extremely short flashes of laser light to inscribe bits of information into a block of ordinary glass. These pulses are called "ultrashort" for a reason. Each one lasts mere quadrillionths of a second (aka femtoseconds or 10^-15 s). To get your head around that: comparing ten femtoseconds to a single minute is like comparing one minute to the entire age of the universe.
Writing in glass:
Femtosecond laser pulses also have a practical technological application. They can be used to make changes deep inside transparent materials such as glass. These lasers produce light of a wavelength that normally passes through glass without interaction. However, when ultrashort pulses of this light are tightly focused on a particular region, it produces an intense electric field that alters the molecular structure of the glass in the focal zone. This means only a tiny three-dimensional volume, often less than a millionth of a metre to a side, is affected. This is called a "voxel", which can be made at precisely controlled positions in the glass.
[...] The Silica project does not claim to have made a new scientific breakthrough. Instead, the team presents the first comprehensive demonstration of a practical, real-world technology. Their work brings together all the key elements of such a storage platform based on femtosecond lasers and glass. It includes encoding data, writing, reading, decoding and error correction. The work explores different strategies for reliability, writing speed, energy efficiency and data density, and involves systematic assessments of the data lifetime. These allow an extremely high storage density of 1.59 gigabits per cubic millimetre.
[...] Finally, accelerated ageing experiments suggest that the written data, even in the case of the more sensitive phase voxels, could remain stable for more than 10,000 years. This vastly exceeds the lifetime of conventional archival storage media such as magnetic tape or hard drives.
[Journal Reference]: https://opg.optica.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-21-24-2023
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