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Researchers Store Optical Data In Five Dimensions
Al writes "Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia, have developed an optical material capable of storing information in five dimensions. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers were able to write six different patterns within the same area. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic that has been spun flat onto a glass substrate and multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interference. The team achieved a storage density of 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of 10 nanorod layers."
... if you add a sixth dimension (time), you can store a near-infinite amount of information!
Retrieval is a bitch though.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
x,y,z,strange and charmed?
..that my toaster is four dimensional because I can describe it as "silver".
This is cool enough as it is, I don't understand why the technobabble was added: polarization and color information layers may be novel attributes of a disc but there's no real reason to describe them as "5-dimensional" other than to sound physics-y.
Goldschläger!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Sweet, more vaporware that will never hit shelves for less than $20,000 a disk, if it ever makes it out at all (possibly a hyperbole). Just like holographic storage. While the idea is fascinating that it can store in x,y,z, polarization, and wavelength, I wonder if this will ever lead to anything practical besides a geekgasm at the idea of a 1cm^2 TB thumbdrive.
...can it be the Age of Aquarius?
Hopefully, they can get away from glass, and use something less fragile.
That's not the same as having six dimensions.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
3 wavelengths * 2 polarizations = 6, doesn't it?
length=x
height=y
width=z
the other two dimensions must be Patty and Selma
Oops...this just in...The Fifth Dimension apparently has only existed since the 1960s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Dimension
Yeah! take that Sony. They not only have blue ray, they have blue, yellow and green ray.
It's a color laser light-show smackdown!.
Boo-Yeah!!!
This Sig does not Exist.
Once again, reporters fail to use standard units. What's this in LOCs? (libraries of congress)
I used to read about stuff just like this in Scientific American in ..... 1993.
So where are the products? That's what I want to know. Not bashing on the researchers here, but I will be I 70 before I here there is an actual product I can buy?
. . . you might hit Buckaroo Banzai on the road.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
is engineering a read/write head which is bent at 90 degrees to reality in two distinct and orthogonal directions.
The downside is that a head crash would threaten the integrity of the space-time continuum worse than a Large Hadron Collider mishap and two Star Trek: Voyager episodes all occurring at the same time.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I have a hard enough time keeping track of my data to have it go time traveling and wandering around the universe like an old TARDIS.
1.1TB thanks to optical storage in 5 dimensions...3 more and we'll be driving cars through mountains. I can't wait. I just hope the researchers behind this work realize that no mater where they go, there they are.
Dr. Vasili Orlov: What was that all about?
Chandra: I've erased all of HAL's memory from the moment the trouble started.
Dr. Vasili Orlov: The 9000 series uses holographic memory so chronological erasures would not work.
Chandra: I made a tapeworm.
Walter Curnow: You made a what?
Chandra: It's a program that's fed into a system that will hunt down and destroy any desired memories.
Without getting into semantics, I fail to see how using 3 different wavelengths qualifies as three different dimensions. At most they should count as utilizing part of one dimension. Same with polarization being an extra dimension.
Of course our current communication technologies already use these two properties of light to multiplex signals over the air/fiber, so why not do it with storage as well?
For Sale: 1TB 5-dimensional gold nanorod HDD, $999999.97(Wall Mart pricing) Limit 2 per customer.
... is not the same thing as five dimensions. Otherwise my arm is a six-dimensional manipulator. I don't think so.
Crap. Just when I get used to having to work an extra fourth dimensional shift, now I have to pick up work on a 5th dimension?
When will I sleep?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
TA talks about disks etc. Solid state is the future, if I am not mistaken. We can have any number of flash memory "layers" even now... capacity is no longer the most important factor, other parameters like "write speeds" are.
This should have been tagged "vapor ware". What about the materials involved (gold) ? Re-write ability ? Speed of write ? Speed of reads ? Possible seek times ? How well manufacturing of this scales ? etc.
Wavelength is definitely a full dimension, as it would be possible to read data at a near infinite number of specific wavelengths. Reading should be easy because you can just pass the light through a prism and check a specific angle of refraction to find the wavelength you need. Writing would be trickier, but it's an engineering problem that can be improved upon over time.
I'm not sure if I'd call polarization a dimension because there are only two angles you can work with, the angle you start with and the angle perpendicular to it. If you try to use a third angle, data from other two will mix with what you're trying to read. So I would say polarization adds another bit (allowing you to store twice as much), but not another full dimension (potentially allowing you to store orders of magnitude more).
Yes, but can it run Linux?
It may store 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter but the reader is as big as a room and the writer is as big as your house, but next year they will only be $30 on Woot.
(silly speculation. Not to be confused with researched facts)
Bunch of morons adding up layers and calling them dimensions. "ooooh I have just entered the fifth dimension of my office - er - I mean the fifth floor"
I wish they'd get away from this whole spinning platter fixation. Mechanical movement was necessary in the days when you needed to induce an electric current from magnetic fields, but we're optical now. Surely we can just build an array of laser diodes and phototransistors on a chip and read the entire surface without moving things back and forth.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
My hat is off to whomever tagged this as Isolinear chips. You sire, I admire!
Why are the centimeters cubic if there are 5 dimensions? Wouldn't it be quintic centimeters or something?
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
You know that your post had absolutely nothing to do with the parent post, right?
I was wondering how two polorizations of light were being counted as dimensions, as light still needs a wavelength. Looks like each wavelength can store two bits of information, two patterns (see the photo on the article page), by polorizing it at different angles. So horizontal red is one dimension, verticle red is another; they're both used seperately. Hmm... why are they calling it 5? Am I missing something?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
You're thinking of an oscillation overthruster.
If words meant things, we wouldn't have this argument twice a week. Unfortunately, it's an unenforceable suggestion - people use words as they please.
I prefer to think of this as storing something in three geometric dimensions and two buzzword/marketing dimensions.
As to the time-as-a-dimension thing, was there ever anything so completely wrong? Do things change over time in the second or fourth geometric dimensions? Whoops.
I have to learn to admit to myself that the dimension discussion, like the "what's a planet" discussion, has become political and therefore entered the realm of the perpetually insoluble.
I got bad news for these people..
Your ADSL modem transmits on 256 carriers (wavelengths), with each carrier modulating a QAM (2-dimensional) signal. In other words, the modem uses 512 dimensions [not explicitly including time].
Storage in 5 dimensions? They've got a long way to go.
but the discs cost 6 grand
It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. Yes, it's an excimer frozen in its excited state...
This shit gets me hot. Tell me more about your dimensions...
Ok my math might be wrong here but that is about 155 GB on a standard CD. If I remember correctly that is like 3x Blue Ray.
These dimensions are length, width, depth, polarization and color. Polarization is not a horizontal/vertical dimension - it's a continuous angle of deviation from an arbitrary line perpendicular to the read/write ray. Color, or wavelength, is likewise a continuous dimension. This is important because increases in the ability to create and read differing angles of polarity and wavelength each give as much improvement as increases in bits-per-millimeter (feature size) in the other dimensions. Twice as many colors? That's twice as much data. Going from horizontal/vertical to 45 degree increments? That's double again. And because the dimensions are continuous there's no physical limit to how much they can multiply data storage capacity, which is different from layers in a Blu-Ray because in that technology there's a limit to how many layers you can have.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wavelength doesn't really count as a dimension for stroage, nor can one store an infinite amount of information by using an infinite number of frequencies. However, polarization could be considered a dimension for the purposes of storage.
The problem with anything in the frequency domain is that you cannot encode a single frequency without creating a spread which crosses multiple frequencies. This limits how short a pulse one can encode at the desired frequency and how closely one can pack discrete frequencies together to encode different data. Coupled with the noise floor the combination limits the amount of data which can be stored in the frequency domain.
for example, if you were to look at the fourier transform of a sine wave you would see a single frequency. However, if you were to look at the fourier transform of the sine wave and INCLUDE the lack of a sine wave before and after the sine wave pulse being encoded, you would see a log of bleedover into other frequencies due to the ramp-up and ramp-down times. Any change, such as going from flatline to a sine-wave, will create a lot of harmonics. Harmonics can be reduced (but not eliminated) by using an envelope to ramp-up or ramp-down the operation, but an envelope of course requires the pulse duration to be longer. So the amount of data which can be stored is limited no matter what you do.
It works a bit differently when one is working in a quantum mechanical domain... in that case it is possible to store discrete information at discrete frequencies, but you only have particular frequencies to work with, typically related to the energy level of the electrons being knocked around.
-Matt
Although this is, as you rightly pointed out, just another yawn-inducing bullshit vapourware story, it's a yawn-inducing bullshit vapourware story from and about Australia!
Slashdot was hijacked by Australian "editors" some time back in 2006 or so, and ever since there has been at least one (but usually far more) non-stories which have involved Australia in some way or other.
It used to be that Slashdot was justifiably criticised for being too USA-centric, but those were the good old days. Now we have to wade through piles of shitty Australian flag-waving crap just to find actual worthwhile stories from anywhere.
What we really need is an affordable optical backup solution for home and SMB PCs. We haven't really had one since DVD and no, BD is a non starter since Sony cares more about DRM than the PC market. Last I heard you can't even play a BD movie on a PC because of all the DRM. It will end up like Laserdisc which kept a niche of videophiles for many years while Joe Public just went DVD. Here is what we need: It needs to be 100Gb per disc at least, 250Gb per disc would be better. It needs to have at LEAST a 5 year shelf life like even the cheapo DVDs do now, and it needs to be built first and foremost as a PC solution FIRST, and not some media conglomerates DRM wet dream that is passed to the PC later. Finally it needs to be affordable, with burners starting in the $100-$150 range and discs for a buck.
So if any researchers are reading this, takes those notes down. if you build this we will be happy to back up the money trucks straight to your door and bury your company under so much cash you'll have to buy garbage trucks just to haul it all away. All of the PC builders will be happy to push your product, as handing home users USB drives is still a cringe worthy experience and half the time they manage to bone the backups anyway. With something like this Nero could just add your format to Backitup and home users could just follow the wizard. And make it cheap enough and they can burn more than one copy so if they bone one they still got a good shot of getting their stuff back. Because DVD is no longer viable for back up and with the size of drives changing every day users are gonna end up with drawers full of 200Gb USB drives which may or not spin up when they dig them out to restore. We got too much stuff and not enough places to put them. Solve this problem and you can buy your own island with all the money folks will be throwing at you.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Just to clarify - what we are talking about here is not spatial dimensions in the popular sense but "degrees of freedom": they have a procedure that takes five independent parameters. Sometimes it would be nice to not see a headline that tries to make a senstational headline out of a simple, down-to-earth matter. I mean, this is a bit like saying "I made a ten-dimensional cake" because it happens to contain ten ingredients; just get real, man.
(Some Geek's Grandpa)
I don't like it, it's not one bit! You know, one day a rottweiler bit me, and left some marks...
I wonder if data can be stored in the biopatterns of dogbites. You can have teeth shape by breed, bloodloss, pattern of bite, ...
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They've got 3 wavelengths + 2 polarizations. So they can store 5 "things" at the same location on the disc.
Assuming that the disc is bigger than just a single point, they could add x, y and possibly z to that list.
Wavelength doesn't really count as a dimension for stroage, nor can one store an infinite amount of information by using an infinite number of frequencies.
Not true. A coordinate system is not required to be infinite in any or all of its dimensions. For something to be considered a dimension, it needs only be able to represent more than one state.
Can't wait for the usb key market to get a handle on this, and start deploying 1tb usb keys....
it will make storage hdd obsolete!
Did you read the article?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Both Spiderman and Rocket Robin Hood had a lot of trouble with Dementia 5! Do these researchers really believe they can do better?
but that's 105 TB on a disk the size of a CD. I don't know about you, but in the Medical field, that's VERY useful. I'm really curious what the read / write speeds are, but there are huge possibilities. The biggest I can think of is disaster recovery backups. No more worrying about multiple servers in multiple locations, just mail Cd's out once a week/month.
Seeing that writes don't have to be fast, reads just need to be at least X for video, this could have numerous applications. Optical can be much better than magnetic for data integrity if made right. This could really help w/ long term storage of medical data which has crazy 7yr, 10yr, and lifetime limits depending on the type of data. It's a huge issue right now, as many medical facillities in the outlying communities have failing systems, and data loss is basically shrugged off because you can't do much about it.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
no, please no! i never wanted to hear that name again, and yet, there it be :(
why not? the goertzel algorythm can tell how much power from a signal is provided by a componing harmonic with a certain wavelength. So for example a yellow beam can be split into two beams of red and green wavelength. So yellow can be counted as a 2 dimensional color. If the wavelengths are different enough the interference between the green information and the yellow information is negligible. And yes those clowns that are calling themselves scientists should know that if three roughly independent beams can be found in the visible spectrum, imagine how many more they could find in an infinite range of frequencies... it's not like we're using human eyes for reading the medium.
> The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic
> that has been spun flat onto a glass substrate and multiple data patterns can
> be written and read within the same area in the material without interference.
You realize guys like Dr. Doom, Thanos, Darkseid, etc. are so god damned smart they can just invent stuff like this spur of the moment, as the need arises, don't you? >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.