Data storage enters the ‘fifth dimension’

Published in Physics World, 20 May 2009

The first DVD–sized discs with storage capacities well over one terabyte could be available in as little as five years, according to researchers in Australia who have invented a new storage technique. The concept, which the researchers have already demonstrated on test media, uses layers of gold nanorods to achieve ‘five–dimensional recording’.

Optical discs, such as CDs and DVDs, store data as a spiral track of microscopic pits etched onto their surface. To read the data, light from a laser diode is reflected from the surface and the reflected light drops in intensity every time the beam hits a pit. […]

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