New research leads the way to creating cheaper, more practical high-density optical storage

A wall of data on a large screen.
(Image credit: Pixabay)

In a groundbreaking study, researchers from Wuhan University and the State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science have demonstrated the potential of Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR)-based two-dimensional nanostructures for optical storage. 

The study, published in Optics Communications, provides another possibility for ultra-high density and high-resolution optical storage.

Optical storage technology has been developing rapidly recently, with an increasing amount of research focusing on multi-dimensional high-density storage. While three-dimensional storage can achieve ultra-high-density optical storage by stacking two-dimensional storage layer by layer, it has limitations. These include high manufacturing costs, large processing errors, and complex readout processes. As a result, the implementation of two-dimensional ultra-high-density optical storage has become an area of great interest.

Superior to Blu-ray

The research team, led by Zhidan Lei, Dekun Yang, and Yiduo Xu, used 'plasmonic technology' to realize ultra-high-density, low maintenance media, and long-life optical storage. They designed nano-scaled rotary gold square two-dimensional arrays to achieve ultra-high-density optical storage.

For angle-resolved LSPR nano-arrays, when the rotation angle of a single unit gold square nano-structure is 2°, the storage density was found to be 12.79 GB/cm2. This is a staggering 53.29 times greater than that of a single-layer Blu-ray disc. The researchers found that by varying the shape and size of the nano-structure, even higher two-dimensional storage densities could be achieved.

The findings of the study show that, with proper design, the density of two-dimensional optical storage can match or even exceed that of three-dimensional optical storage, potentially revolutionizing the way we store, archive and access data in the future.

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Wayne Williams
Editor

Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.

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