Opening a new era of eternal data archiving, scientists at University of
Southampton have developed the recording and retrieval processes of
five dimensional (5D) digital data using ultrafast laser writing in
nanostructured glass.
The storage allows unprecedented properties
including 360 TB (terabyte)/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to
1,000 degree Celsius and virtually unlimited lifetime at room
temperature (13.8 billion years at 190 degree Celsius ), the researchers
said.
"It is thrilling to think that we have created the
technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space
for future generations. This technology can secure the last evidence of
our civilisation: all we have learnt will not be forgotten," Peter
Kazansky, professor at University of Southampton in Britain, said in an
official statement.
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.
The technology was first
experimentally demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kb (kilobyte) 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.
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 researchers explained.
The
information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and
orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these
nanostructures.
The study will be presenting at the photonics
industry's renowned SPIE-The International Society for Optical
Engineering Conference in San Francisco, US on Wednesday.
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