2016 ‘Eternal 5D’ data storage could reliably record the history of humankind
<p>Feb 17, 2016 08:34 PM</p>
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my comment that I posted is below:</p>
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Yes, a complete record of the Fourth Reich, presided over eternally by a frozen and uploaded Donald (complete with an exact digital replica of the hair piece.)</p>
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More seriously, exactly how long are we expecting the human race to survive? 10 years; 100 years; 1000 years? Really!</p>
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And more seriously still... great story: perfect for KAI. 360 TB, though, is not huge these days. That's one run in some neuroscience labs, and probably much less than one experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.</p>
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abstract: Eernal 5D data storage by ultrafast laser writing in glass</p>
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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 self-assembled 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.</p>
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paper is in Proc of SPIE OPTO 2016 (in SF today!)</p>
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key fact: this is really long lived: age of Universe 13.8 B years.
eeternal copies of the King James Bible and Magna Carta... an eternal archive.</p>
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