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Although the 10-nanometer gap is minuscule, researchers could build a new type of optical reading and writing head using the technology, suggests Crozier. The magnetic storage industry, he points out, works with a similarly small gap between the head and medium.
Using nano antennas to focus optical light is not an entirely new idea, Crozier says, but their work, published in Applied Physics Letters, is the first time an antenna has been integrated directly onto a laser. This offers an advantage in production because the light source and antenna are in one package. "It's extremely compact and easier to use because alignment with the laser and the antenna is all done in fabrication," he says.
There's a lot of research activity to reduce the spot size of light, but it's especially attractive to the data storage industry, says Bae-Ian Wu, a research scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Using a nano antenna is just one way to gain "super resolution smaller than the wavelength of light." But, he says, the Harvard researchers work "is very good in the sense that they are doing optical experiments to back up their theory, while some papers are only in the realm of theory." The Harvard scientists, he adds, "just did it."
Crozier says his team is exploring fabrication techniques that can further decrease the spot size to 20 nanometers. They're also exploring alternatives to the gold metal that currently coats their nano rods. Silver, for instance, could focus light more efficiently than gold at the wavelengths used by the consumer electronics industry.
Tiny antennae focus infrared laser light down to 100 nanometers, providing a way for scientists to see cells at work.
Researchers have found that splitting a polymer film makes gratings useful in biosensors and DVDs.
I would love to see an adapter or something for the exsisting units out there so the consumer doesn't have to replace his exsisting computer equipement. That would be nice.
I hate compression artifacts in movies. I see them even in DVD movies.
With this much space, you could store a two hour, HDTV 1080p movie completely uncompressed. A 1080p frame is 1920x1080 pixels, at say 32 bits per pixel, is 8.55 Mb per frame. 30 frames per second, is 216,000 frames in a two hour movie. Add in a few megabytes for multichannel Dolby/THX sound and the entire movie would be about 1.64 terabytes, well within the capability of this storage technology.
Plus a 16-way 64-bit display card on a 128-way 64-bit computer to play it...if someone invents a fast enough network interface to push the data as its read. The other option is to have a solid state 4Tb RAM box that lifts the movie into memory and plays it from there.
The point is it would take a new kind of device to play such a movie within two hours...or we'd have to get used to verrrryyyy slowwww motion movies and low pitched surround sound.
Antenna attrition and effect on resolution?
If the electrons oscillate, some will overshoot with sufficient energy to escape or cause interference fringe altering the focus. Would this affect the accuracy of the data recorded? How redundant does the information have to be to get past this issue?
Also, does heat generation affect the antenna attritioning the gap in a short enough time to render it incapable of becoming mass production quality?
Typical mass production would be achievable provided mean time between failures is similar or better than current recording devices.
Difficult playback and recording
With a 10nm tolerance before the beam starts to spread, designing a mechanism that can spin a mass produced disk very fast and maintain virtually no vibration so the "read head" can stay 10nm above the disk will be a difficult engineering job indeed.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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deirdrebeth
25 Comments
But how is it read?
Admitting that I know little about the internal workings of a DVD or CD player...would there have to be a modification to allow these massivly compressed discs to be read? Is there a reasonable consumer solution?
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Monsterboy
92 Comments
Re: But how is it read?
I'd imagine the new discs wouldn't work on the old platforms, just as CD players can't read DVDs. But just as DVDs didn't replace CDs, CDs and DVDs will probably continue to exist alongside the next generation. Not everyone needs that kind of storage, after all.
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liverwort4600
1 Comment
Re: But how is it read?
Yes I will admit that I do have a 12 inch Laserdisc (not a "compact" laser disk) and an 8 inch Floppy Disk. I'm sure the media is still good..
The only reason we don't still use these is because rotating media tends to be inconvenient in size and storage amount. Plus it still HAS to compete with other things like flash drives. Neither the 12" laser disk or 8" Floppy would ever fit in a Laptop.
Reply
teuton
1 Comment
Re: But how is it read?
Very Long Baseline Array - isn't it obvious?
Reply
parkehoover
3 Comments
Re: But how is it read?
Good question. Without a reader the cd would be worhless. That much info on a CD would certainly take a very special kind of reader.
Reply
baatkarlo
4 Comments
Re: But how is it read?
Reading fast is not the only problem here - once recorded, if its read then buffering the data output fast would be a problem also. Current technology would require a solid state RAM device to accomodate such data to use it. Very few solid state computers exist that can claim to process data in memory on solid state RAM. These are used for very large datasets - such as huge data mining ops and data warehouse queries for realtime analytics. So use of such a device would initially be limited to such applications in order to record and retrieve very large datasets in a very small form factor.
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