Color code. A new data-storage technique encodes multiple sets of data in the same area using different colors and polarizations of light.
Credit: Adapted from Peter Zijlstra et al., Nature 459, 410 (2009)
Posted on 05/23/2009 2:01:34 PM PDT by neverdem
Color code. A new data-storage technique encodes multiple sets of data in the same area using different colors and polarizations of light.
Credit: Adapted from Peter Zijlstra et al., Nature 459, 410 (2009)
Better clear a shelf in your basement for that high-end Blu-ray DVD player you just bought. Researchers report that they can boost the amount of data stored on a disc 10,000-fold by using gold nanoparticles. If commercialized, the technology could allow a single disc to hold as many as 300 movies or 250,000 songs.
Today's CDs and DVDs store data as a string of pits burned into a narrow spiral track in plastic discs. Although less of a commercial success, holograms boost data-storage capacities by storing data in three dimensions. In an effort to kick things up a notch, researchers led by Min Gu, an optoelectronics expert at Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn, Australia, added two additional dimensions: the color of light used to write and read the data and the light's polarization, or the direction of its electric field.
Researchers have worked for years to encode multiple sets of data in the same spot without interfering with one another. But efforts have been stymied because they've had low spatial resolution. To boost that resolution, Gu's team suspended an assortment of gold nanoparticles of various sizes and shapes in a clear plastic disc. Nanorods absorb certain frequencies of light depending on their size and shape. That allowed Gu's team to write bits with several colors of laser light in the same region. To encode a single bit of data, a laser pulse melts selected gold nanorods. That deformation changes the way light of a particular color or polarization interacts with them, which allows the data to later be read out. The researchers report in today's issue of Nature that they used their scheme to write data in three colors and two polarizations in the same physical space. The approach could allow discmakers to store up to 1.6 terabytes of data on a single disc.
"This is a very interesting technology and might become commercially successful," says Richard Blahut, an optoelectronics engineer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For it to do so, plenty of issues still need to be addressed, such as increasing the speed at which data can be written and creating compact-disc readers equipped with lasers capable of firing light at different colors and polarizations. Gu's team has signed an agreement with Samsung to commercialize the technology.
The Age of Aquarius — great song.
300 movies or just one super HD movie?
This reminds me of what we in the navy used to call ‘tri state electronics’ (less than straightforward) and ‘iron core memory’(Density was to low)
Neither of which really went anywhere.
Methinks this new thing is viable..
Soon, I’ll have all the information I need at my fingertips in one disk...except for 0’s birth certificate. Mwoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-ha-haaaa!
I remember back in the 80’s my roomate bought a CD player and I didn’t even know what it was. I was afraid to even touch it. LOL!
“Zero is having a bad day. He lost the entire 13th Century.” (Turning to computer)”Didn’t you Zero. Say Hello to Jonathan E. Jonathan is a great Rollerball player...”
I had a friend who worked in a factory making CDs. He gave me one, and I hung it on the wall!
Still leaves disks as an obsolete and bulky storage medium.
Two Terabyte SD cards (The new XDHC standard) were announced at the CES show in January,
Will a CD drive fit in these little netbooks and tablet PCs?
Can they make drives with moving parts ad long lasting, low power consuming, and low heat generating as the competing flash drive technology?
Does the market not tend to move towards one solution for all machines in spite of the best mechanizations of proprietary equipment makers?
You could have "Friday the 13th 1" to "Friday the 13th 300" all on one, though.
When Jupiter aligns with Mars.Then Peace will guide the Planets and Love will rule he stars...
Is this the dawning?
The only way to get 0’s birth cert is to teleport it out of its vault.
And cost $4,000.
... or it'll sell for 99 cents if it only contains imitation Bruce Lee films and the lesser works of Roger Corman.
Since the running time of this album is about 42 minutes, this means that that CD has now been played 337,421 times now - apparently without any loss of fidelity whatsoever. "The Great Gig In The Sky" sounds as crystal clear as it did on it's first spin some 27 years ago!
...if it actually exists...
Can't be the same player.
The government wasn't so sure either. You had to sign a form saying you wouldn't export the CD player to hostile foreign countries, I guess that might use the CD player lasers to enrich uranium.
I think it was actually the computer chip that was (and is) in every CD player. Back in the 80's, there were export controls on computers that could execute more than a certain number of MIPS.
The computer chip in a CD player is a custom chip for a specific purpose, but it probably exceeded the threshold -- because the export controls didn't make a distinction about WHAT the chip actually did.
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