New Technique For Optical Storage Claims 1 Petabyte On a Single DVD 182
melios writes "Using a two-light-beam method a company claims to have overcome Abbe's Law to dramatically increase the storage density for optical media, to the 9 nm scale. From the article: 'The technique is also cost-effective and portable, as only conventional optical and laser elements are used, and allows for the development of optical data storage with long life and low energy consumption, which could be an ideal platform for a Big Data centre.'"
Re:Optical density, schmoptical schmensity! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Optical density, schmoptical schmensity! (Score:5, Informative)
Almost. The overlap causes destructive interference, so the only place where the write occurs is in the centre where there *isn't* overlap. But yeah, this is single layer.
Re:Optical density, schmoptical schmensity! (Score:5, Informative)
A single diffractive optical element could achieve both those functions, but those can't get below the diffraction limit either in the general case (superoscillations can do it as a special case, but those don't really produce spots).
What they are actually using is two photon absorption, the two beam setup allows them to have a tighter distribution of two photon absorption events.
Re:Optical media sucks... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not deterioration of the plastic which causes CDs/DVDs to be unreliable, it's de-lamination of the reflective layer and deterioration of the organic dye for the recordable ones. The first is just causes by poor manufacturing, the second is a little more serious but the method in this article doesn't use dyes, it uses photopolymerization ... which would not necessarily be as failure prone.
Re:Optical density, schmoptical schmensity! (Score:4, Informative)
That's what meta-moderation is for.