The Australian technique will have to compete against a range of high-density data-storage techniques in various stages of development, including flash and next-generation high-density magnetic storage. The results are "early but interesting," says Kevin Curtis, the chief technology officer at InPhase Technologies, a Colorado company that's developing holographic storage, which records in three dimensions using one wavelength. Last week at the IEEE Photonics Society's optical data storage meeting in Florida, InPhase presented a prototype that stores 713 gigabytes per square inch. The company is working with Hitachi to implement the holographic technology in products.

Barry H. Schechtman, executive director emeritus of the Information Storage Industry Consortium, says the Australian work is "a good first demonstration of the long-term potential" of five-dimensional recording to increase optical storage capacity and rates. The gold nanorod recording medium "provides more knobs to turn" than other materials for data storage, he says.

However, Schechtman cautions that the researchers face a tremendous engineering challenge. "It's likely that combining all these variables at once and pushing each toward its natural limits" will prove difficult, he says.

Gu reports that he has an agreement with Samsung and is in discussions with Chinese electronics manufacturer Shenzhen Sunland Technology to license the technology. The first application, he says, is likely to be in archives where large amounts of data from medical imaging files, security encoding, and banking are stored.