A team of scientists from the University of Southampton (United Kingdom) has achieved a giant step forward in the goal of achieving a storage medium that lasts forever. The new 5D storage disk does not have unlimited life, but almost as it is capable of surviving for billions of years.
The device is based on nanostructured glass that enables five-dimensional (5D) recording and retrieval of digital data by femtosecond laser recording. Thanks to these very particular characteristics, the disk allows 360 Terabytes of storage, a thermal stability of up to 1,000 º Celsius and the possibility of becoming the longest-lasting media, with up to 13,800 million years of survival at 190 º C. We are approaching the “eternal age” of information.
The 5D storage system already has many of the main documents that define the history of mankind : the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Newton’s Optics, the British Magna Carta … all of them have been saved with ultra-fast laser , producing extremely short and intense pulses of light.
The way to record the files is “simple”: as if it were Superman’s memory crystals , the files are written in three layers of nanostructured points separated by five micrometers; self-assembled nanostructures modify the paths with which the light passes through the glass, altering the polarization of the light that can be read by a combination of an optical microscope and a polarizer.
The system of digital copies that could survive the human race, has been presented at the meeting of the Optical Engineering Conference in San Francisco (USA).
