back to article Boffins' 5D laser-based storage tech could keep terabytes forever

Boffins in the UK’s Southampton University have devised a five-dimensional storage scheme using glass, femtolasers and a lifespan of billions of years, so they say. Researchers, led by Martynas Beresna, in the university’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have built five-dimensional photonic structures in nano-structured …

Page:

  1. JimmyPage Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Ah, Arthur C Clarke "half baked ideas"

    over 30 years ago, I vaguely imagined a crystalline lattice that could be addressed by laser to act as main storage. TBH, I'm surprised it took so long ....

    1. Haku

      Re: Ah, Arthur C Clarke "half baked ideas"

      Did this vague idea occur after watching that 1974 film Zardoz by any chance?

      1. Tom Chiverton 1

        Re: Ah, Arthur C Clarke "half baked ideas"

        Can. Never. Unsee.

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

          Re: Ah, Arthur C Clarke "half baked ideas"

          Is that the movie where Sean Connery gets a hard-on?

          I'm thinking more along the lines of HAL's "glass block" circuits

      2. JimmyPage Silver badge

        Re:1974 film Zardoz

        not that I am aware of.

        The ACC half baked ideas reference is from an interview I read with him, where he commented he had floated so many ideas in fiction or speculation that had become reality.

        The most famous idea being the geosynchronous communications satellite.

        In a nod to another comment I have made today, he also proposed a space elevator, to reduce the energy required to get into LEO.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Just googled 1974 film Zardoz

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz

          on paper, it sounds like a decent plot ... hint of "The City and the Stars" ...

        2. maffski

          Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

          He also postulated TV dinners, which is where the 'half baked' comes from.

        3. Charles 9

          Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

          "In a nod to another comment I have made today, he also proposed a space elevator, to reduce the energy required to get into LEO."

          At least that idea has a concrete status: Not Possible YET. We've already got a pretty decent idea of the physical characteristics needed to pull it off. We just haven't found or invented a material able to tick all the marks yet.

          1. Grikath

            Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz @ charles 9

            Not possible ever, just like the warp drive that gets trotted out every other month. But hey... Starry-Eyed dreamers and all... It's almost like watching your average startup trying to become a Unicorn...

        4. cosmogoblin
          Thumb Up

          Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

          If you want to get technical (and who here doesn't?) you can't reduce the energy required to get into LEO, which is about 30 MJ / kg.

          What you can reduce is the amount of energy wasted in doing so. By using more efficient technology, we can get closer to that 30 MJ / kg. Right now, I think our tech is about 0.1% efficient...

          1. mosw

            Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

            " you can't reduce the energy required to get into LEO"

            With an elevator you could harvest energy when you bring mass down from orbit to partially offset the energy needed to lift mass up. So the net energy cost to orbit would go down. If you are mining raw materials in space you may even get a net energy surplus from the elevator.

            Unfortunately, I don't think there is even a theoretical material strong enough to make such an elevator.

            1. Charles 9

              Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

              "Unfortunately, I don't think there is even a theoretical material strong enough to make such an elevator."

              But given how old the idea is, you would think someone would've put the concept to bed at this point by mathematically proving that a material capable of being the cable for a space elevator cannot physically exist due to exceeding physical limits on material strength or whatever. The fact we haven't seen such a proof indicates it's still possible but we haven't come up with the right combination of materials.

          2. David Pollard

            Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

            Gravitational energy of something at the Earth's surface, 30 MJ/kg, is of the same order of magnitude as the calorific value of carbohydrates. Is this just coincidence or a subtle reflection of the anthropogenic principle? Is the Earth just the right sort of size for organic life?

  2. Bc1609

    Seriously long-term storage

    Of course, you have to make sure that the procedures and software for reading the data last just as long as the data itself.

    1. Peter2 Silver badge

      Re: Seriously long-term storage

      It's only been 70,000 years since we climed out of trees. Arabic numerals have existed for only 1500 years. English is virtually unrecognisable beyond 500 years ago, and Roman type characters have existed for maybe 3000 years.

      In 13.8 billion (13,800,000,000) years, it's a pretty certain bet that the entities reading data from such long term storage will not only not understand the file formats, but won't understand our language and it is perhaps unlikely that they will recognise even the concepts our language is based on. (Just look at how different English is from Latin after a couple of thousand years!)

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: Seriously long-term storage

        Liste, dude.

        Self-describing formats are no mystery any longer.

        Concepts of language don't change that much - pace all the linguistic's oohing and aaahing it's just activations in slightly incompatible semantic networks.

        Just add a proper primer and get on with it.

        Actually, you could add a dump of Watson (or whatever comes next) to it while you are at it and indicate how to run it (add machine schematics for implementation) to help the future reader along.

      2. Robert Helpmann??
        Childcatcher

        Re: Seriously long-term storage

        In 13.8 billion (13,800,000,000) years, it's a pretty certain bet that the entities reading data from such long term storage will not only not understand the file formats, but won't understand our language

        Perhaps it would be better to opt for something more akin to HD-Rosetta as analog information may be encoded along side digital. Alas, it is estimated to last a paltry 10,000 years as a storage medium, but a similar approach in different media might be worth considering.

      3. Dz

        Re: Seriously long-term storage

        Porn will always be porn. So when said 360TB porn collection is found it will prove useful/scientifically valuable to some race or species. Basically porn = universal language.

  3. tirk
    Joke

    Eternity? Exaggeration surely!

    I doubt they'll survive the Big Rip!

    (Where is the dark energy icon??)

  4. Tom7

    What's not to like?

    Well, I don't see any numbers for read or write speeds...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What's not to like?

      ... or price, or how long it will take to have it in my desk.

      And where is the "and where is my flying car" icon?

  5. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    Our legacy, our duty

    ...the prospect of a lifespan in billions of years for storage...

    Finally we can save tons of cats' videos and -not to forget- porn for the pleasure of our descendants in a so far future that they won't know cats as we do. And our today's will be considered ancient alien porn. Wow!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Heechee prayer fans

      Our descendants will probably use it as windows for cathedrals to "Zuckergod", being completely uncomprehending of basics facts of science.

  6. sam 38

    ...

    but does it blend?

  7. Dan Wilkie

    I don't understand, how have they made 2 more dimensions (if we ignore time, which I don't think is relevant here)

    1. Cuddles

      In this context "dimension" means more like "degree of freedom". It's the same reason you can have things like a 6-axis joystick, even though there are only three independent axes in normal 3D Cartesian coordinates.

  8. TJ1

    Re: I don't understand ...

    "The dimensions of the three-layered nano-structured dot voxel are length, width, depth, size and orientation."

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: I don't understand ...

      Well, it seems you can orient and size the voxel so that it is described by 5 numbers, so you get a storage tuple (l, w, d, s, o, φ) at each point in the material. This allows you to encode at least five bits.

      The question is of course: How large is size "1"

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: I don't understand ...

        "This allows you to encode at least five bits."

        Oh crap! I learned to program using 5-hole punched tape. Shift in, shift out to get enough codes just to do ASCII. And hand editing if you missed a shift code was a PITA. Won't someone think of the poor overheads?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I don't understand ...

          I still remember how to wind papertape (figure of 8) and the "overheads" is where we hung them until needed. [Overheads in sailor speak is shit hanging from above.]

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Glass is a super cooled liquid...

    The windows in very old buildings are thicker at the bottom as the glass is (very) slowly moving and sagging.

    Wouldn't this effect destroy the very small structures these lasers are creating over the time periods they are talking about?

    1. AIBailey

      Re: Glass is a super cooled liquid...

      That's been something akin to an urban myth for some time now, and has been debunked on several occasions.

      http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-glass-is-a-liquid-myth-has-finally-been-destroyed-496190894

    2. Xamol

      Re: Glass is a super cooled liquid...

      Is it?

      http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glass-liquid/

      Edit - Damn, beaten to it...

      1. Fun Fun

        Re: Glass is a super cooled liquid...

        Medieval glass windows are thicker at the lower end for a particular reason.

        As the glass is thicker at the lower end it acts a little bit like a prism; it changes the angle of the incoming ray of the sun in such a way that the ray of light can reach farther inside the church.

        Illumination is the reason. 8/

  10. Christoph

    "13.8 billion years"

    Why such a precise number? Or did they mean "as long a time as the Universe has already existed"?

    1. Charles 9

      Note they also said a specific temperature, so I imagine they physically measured the degree of deformation the substrate experienced during their experiment and extrapolated a point at which the data is too degraded to recover. IOW, it's a number to perhaps take with a pinch of salt but at least they can explain how they came up with it. Plus note the temperature was actually quite high (close to 500K) and nowhere near standard temperature or your average room temperature. As noted, glass is actually extremely stable as long as you don't get it up near the melting point (in fact that why glass is rather brittle--it has no "give").

      PS. We've been hearing about holographic crystalline data storage for decades now (add Babylon 5 to the Sci-Fi worlds that make use of it in their fiction), but we've yet to see them actually get out of the lab. The end of the article, though, hopefully paints a different picture. Let's hope we can actually get our hands on this for an archival medium in the near future.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        "PS. We've been hearing about holographic crystalline data storage for decades now (add Babylon 5 to the Sci-Fi worlds that make use of it in their fiction), but we've yet to see them actually get out of the lab."

        Didn't IBM come up with some form of crystalline 3D storage some years ago? Maybe it's still 50 years away.

        1. almadenmike

          Yep. IBM's holographic data storage research had some significant technical successes, but interest declined after it became pretty clear that it would not compete with the improving price/performance of existing storage technologies. Here's a link to an article that sums up many of the challenges: http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/storage/whatever-happened-to-holographic-storage-1099304

          Still, I enjoyed producing informative articles and dramatic photos, such as this one -- http://vig.extremetech.com/media/images/16655.jpg -- for IBM's research news reports.

  11. speedbird007

    Animal skins

    Finally Parliament has a long lasting alternative to vellum for storing legislation? Think of the kids.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Daisy, Daisy...

    Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. ...

  13. earl grey
    Meh

    nano-structured fuzed quartz glass

    Not your run of the mill window glass.

    1. PNGuinn
      Linux

      Re: nano-structured fuzed quartz glass

      "Not your run of the mill window glass."

      Nope, this is proper Linux glass!

  14. frank ly

    re. voxel

    I thought a voxel is a fundemental 'volume element' as used in 3-D solid modelling. This being an extension of a pixel being a fundemental 'picture element' for 2-D modelling/representation.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: re. voxel

      They may be stretching the definition here a little bit, but I can see the point. Each point of data in this design supposedly is a volumetric element, just not of uniform size or orientation (thus the additional two dimensions).

  15. PleebSmasher
    Dead Vulture

    Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013

    http://phys.org/news/2013-07-5d-optical-memory-glass-evidence.html

    http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/5dopticalstore.html

    http://www.cnet.com/news/a-360tb-disc-that-holds-data-for-more-than-1-million-years/

    http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Storage_by_Ultrafast_Laser_Nanostructuring_in_Glass.pdf

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Alien

      Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013

      THIS IS A SCANDAL!

      So why is it showing up, today, here?

      What are they not telling us?

    2. PleebSmasher
      Dead Vulture

      Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013

      "The International Society for Optical Engineering Conference" is actually called "SPIE Photonics West 2016" AFAICT.

      Still trying to vet details in this story, still trying to understand why this is newsworthy when the 360 TB/optical disk @ billions of years claims were made in mid-2013.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Paris Hilton

        Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013

        Um, El Reg ran it then too.

        Took this to be an update in light of the forthcoming presentation.

        No?

        1. PleebSmasher
          Paris Hilton

          Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013

          The story is not written like an update and doesn't link to the old article.

    3. PleebSmasher
      Boffin

      Re: Story is nearly 3 years old! Published in July 2013

      http://www.spie.org/Documents/ConferencesExhibitions/PW16%20LASE%20Abstracts%20lr.pdf

      Conference 9736: Laser-based Micro- and Nanoprocessing X

      9736-29, Session 7

      Eternal 5D data storage by ultrafast laser

      writing in glass (Invited Paper)

      Peter G. Kazansky, Martynas Beresna, Jingyu Zhang, Rokas Drevinskas, Aabid Patel, Au?ra Cerkauskaite, Optoelectronics Research Ctr. (United Kingdom)

      Femtosecond laser writing in transparent materials has attracted considerable interest due to new science and a wide range of applications from laser surgery, 3D integrated optics and optofluidics to geometrical phase optics and ultra-stable optical data storage. A decade ago it has been discovered that under certain irradiation conditions self-organized subwavelength structures with record small features of 20 nm, could be created in the volume of silica glass. On the macroscopic scale the selfassembled nanostructure behaves as a uniaxial optical crystal with negative birefringence. The optical anisotropy, which results from the alignment of nano-platelets, referred to as form birefringence, is of the same order of magnitude as positive birefringence in crystalline quartz. The two independent parameters describing birefringence, the slow axis orientation (4th dimension) and the strength of retardance (5th dimension), are explored for the optical encoding of information in addition to three spatial coordinates. The slow axis orientation and the retardance are independently manipulated by the polarization and intensity of the femtosecond laser beam. The data optically encoded into five dimensions is successfully retrieved by quantitative birefringence measurements. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including hundreds of terabytes per disc data capacity and thermal stability up to 1000°. Even at elevated temperatures of 160oC, the extrapolated decay time of nanogratings is comparable with the age of the Universe - 13.8 billion years. The demonstrated recording of the digital documents, which will survive the human race, including the eternal copies of Kings James Bible and Magna Carta, is a vital step towards an eternal archive.

Page:

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon