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."

Comments

Five dimensional in the same way...

[Carbon016]

..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.

Re:Five dimensional in the same way...

[calmofthestorm]

To be blunt, your toaster is very much four dimensional if you care about its color.

In ML we talk about feature spaces having hundreds of dimensions and are just being accurate. The things you care about are the dimensions. Want Euclidean dimension in space? There are three dimensions. Dimensionality of spin? One for each of the quantities.

If we want to sound smart, we explain the theory behind SVMs and how it's in an infinite dimensional space:-)

Re:Five dimensional in the same way...

[Carbon016]

It's clear there's a use of the word that's technically fine but it's misrepresentative to pretty much anyone that's going to be reading the BBC article or this Technology Review site or whatever and all sources claim it wasn't the media making it up. It's pretty easy to post here and imply people are idiots because they don't know more than the popular science definition but then again everyone's an idiot about a great many things.

Yawn.

[scubamage]

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.

Re:5 dimensions?

[khellendros1984]

A classic example given in programming is a 6 dimensional array.
1. Building
2. Floor
3. Wing
4. Room
5. Shelf
6. Book
I guess I've been accustomed to thinking about larger dimension numbers than 3 or 4 for a long time.

Re:And..

[x2A]

There is no "the" anythingth dimension; a dimension is just a property or variable that can be changed independantly of other dimensions within the context. So, in many areas of physics, the four dimensions you use in equations etc will often include time, but that doesn't mean that time is some universal dimension to be found in all equasions. For this storage, when you do the reading/writing is irrelevant to the data, eg, if you write a 1 at 4pm, it will be the same as if you wrote that 1 at 5pm. But, if you write it in a different colour, then the data is different, so, the data at any location can be expressed as a function of the intensity of each of the three colours (or wavelengths) and the intensity of the two different polorizations of light - five dimensions.

If for example you want to talk about the mass of any of the points where data's stored, then what matters is how many atoms there are there, nothing else is relevant, and so you'd only say there's one dimension.

So as you see, dimensions aren't universal things, they're purely contextual.