Washington: Futuristic discs with a storage capacity 2,000 times that of current DVDs could be just around the corner, thanks to researchers who have created them using nanotechnology to store information in various colours.
An international team, led by Swinburne University of Technology, has in fact been able to use nanoscopic particles to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc, the 'Nature' journal reported.
According to the researchers, their work has shown how nanotechnology could enable the creation of 'five dimensional' discs with huge storage capacities.
"We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc," lead researcher Prof Min Gu said.
Discs currently have three spatial dimensions, but using nanoparticles the researchers were able to introduce a spectral -- or colour -- dimension as well as a polarisation dimension. "These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs," Gu said. ( And, in order to create the "colour dimension", the researchers inserted gold nanorods onto a disc's surface. As nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allowed the team to record information in a range of different colour wavelengths on the same physical disc location.
This is a major improvement on current DVDs that are recorded in single colour wavelength using a laser, they say.
"The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees. So for example, we were able to record at zero degree polarisation. Then on top of that, we were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarisation, without them interfering with each other," co-researcher James Chon said.
Comments
0 comment