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

And..

[MyLongNickName]

... if you add a sixth dimension (time), you can store a near-infinite amount of information!

Retrieval is a bitch though.

Re:And..

[fireman sam]

I use the MD5 compression algorithm to store my data. I still haven't found a good MD5 decompressor yet.

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.

Storage in the Fifth Dimension...

[Chris Mattern]

...can it be the Age of Aquarius?

Ooohhh! Snap!!

[gizmo2199]

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!!!

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:-)

The hardest part

[idontgno]

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.

Re:5 dimensions?

[blueg3]

Most physicists should be perfectly comfortable applying the term "dimensions" to cases other than spatial dimensions.

Once you're used to infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, media articles that mention "five-dimensional storage" are only infinitesimally interesting by comparison.

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:5 dimensions?

[blueg3]

Your example is easy to relate to, but there's a problem people should be aware of. While you can refer to the book's location using a 6-dimensional quantity, you *could* do it in 3, by giving its position in space. In a "real" n-dimensional system, you cannot reduce the system to less than n dimensions.

A good, but less-accessible example, is the state of an object in classical mechanics. The position of an object is 3-dimensional. The state, however, is 6-dimensional: your position (3D) and momentum (3D).

Re:I count 6 dimensions not 5

[Fungii]

Hmm... why are they calling it 5? Am I missing something?

Yes - the dimension of the system is just the number of independent variables, the 3 wavelengths and the 2 polorisations.

Think about it in terms of a 1D line vs a 2D plane. In the case of the line there is the less than 0 and greater than 0 regions. When you move up to a plane there are two new greater than 0 and less than 0s (in the y plane as opposed to the x plane of the 1D line, say). So you have 4 possible combinations (or quadrants in the plane) in 2 dimensions.

Also - note that light which is circularly polarised is both vertically polarised *and* horizontally polarised, so you can have unpolarised red light; vertically polarised red light; horizontally polarised red light and vertically and horizontally polarised red light.

(Similar to: just red light; red light and blue light; red light and green light and red light blue light and green light)