Data Storage  

A major step in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years has been made. Using nanostructured glass, scientists have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have made a development in the field of of digital data storage that may be capable of surviving for billions of years.

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

"It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations."

The storage solution allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving.

The technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records and could also be used for very stable and safe form of portable memory.

The technology was first experimentally demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D. Now the researchers have further developed their 'Superman’ memory crystal.'

Now, major documents from human history such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton’s Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race. A copy of the UDHR encoded to 5D data storage was recently presented to UNESCO by the ORC at the International Year of Light (IYL) closing ceremony in Mexico.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded into 5D optical data

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The documents were recorded using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light. The file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre). The self-assembled nanostructures change the way light travels through glass, modifying polarisation of light that can then be read by combination of optical microscope and a polariser, similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.

Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

Professor Peter Kazansky, from the ORC, says: “It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations. This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”

The researchers will present their research at the photonics industry's renowned SPIE Photonics West—The International Society for Optical Engineering Conference in San Francisco, USA this week. The invited paper, ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Writing in Glass’ will be presented by the team.

SOURCE  University of Southampton

By 33rd Square

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 Holograms  

The interactive holograms featured in films like Iron Man and Big Hero 6 may be closer to reality thanks to work done by Japanese researchers with femtosecond lasers.

Researchers in Japan have created a mid-air 3D holographic plasma display that also features haptic feedback.

"This study is the first step to discuss and design laser-based aerial volumetric displays," write the researchers.

The system, demonstrated in the video below, works by way of using a femtosecond laser to turn small pockets of air (voxels) into plasma.

"This study is the first step to discuss and design laser-based aerial volumetric displays."

The holographic system, which will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2015 next month, can render up to 200,000 voxels per second, but the physical size of the display is limited to about a cubic centimeter.

The researchers commented on the details of the theoretical principles, system setup, and experimental evaluations, and also discusses the scalability of the system, along with limitations, and applications. "Although we focus on laser-induced plasma, the same considerations can be applied to
other emission techniques such as fluorescence and cavitation," they write.

A femtosecond laser is a laser that fires for a short burst—on the order of one quadrillionth of a second. The laser hits an atom or molecule, causing an electron to become ionized and then the electron loses its extra energy in the form of a photon that is emitted as visible light.

To transform the single plasma dot into a full 3D display, the researchers passed the laser through a spatial light modulator (SLM) connected to a PC to create the hologram, and then a galvano scanner and varifocal lens to "draw" each voxel with specific X, Y, and Z coordinates.

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One of the more intriguing aspects of the 3D display is that it also incorporates haptic feedback. According to the research paper, when you touch one of the voxels, "shock waves are generated by plasma ... the user feels an impulse on the finger as if the light has physical substance." The researchers don't go into any further detail on the topic, however.

The paper also notes that using a femtosecond laser (as opposed to a picosecond or nanosecond laser) is one of the novel aspects of the system. Because the laser bursts are so short, the plasma is not that energetic, and so it's safe to touch. The researchers also tested a nanosecond laser, but found that it burned a piece of leather within 100 milliseconds.

The femtosecond laser setup appears to be safe and doesn't cause any skin damage when a user touches the display, though you still shouldn't look into the laser source. When touched, the laser feels like sandpaper, says principal investigator Yoichi Ochiai, although some participants thought the plasma felt a little like a static shock.

For now, the holographic plasma display is too small to be of much use—and perhaps more importantly, the equipment used to produce the display is too large and expensive for anything outside of the lab. The principles are all quite sound, though, and there's a lot of interest in free-space display technologies that don't require some kind of screen or other medium to project the image onto.



SOURCE  Popular Science

By 33rd Square

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 Data Storage  

Scientists have developed a new 'Superman memory crystals' that could store vast quantities of information — 360 TB on a disc, about 100 times more than current disk drives — for more than a million years.

By using nanostructured glass, scientists at the University of Southampton have, for the first time, experimentally demonstrated the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime.

Called as the ‘Superman’ memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz, which is able to store vast quantities of data for over a million years. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

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The work improves on prototype crystal storage created by Hitachi that was announced earlier this year. This current work was done in the framework of EU project Femtoprint.

The goal of Femtoprint is to develop a printer for microsystems with nanoscale features fabricated out of glass. Recent researches have shown that one can form three-dimensional patterns in glass material using low-power femtosecond laser beam. This simple process opens interesting new opportunities for a broad variety of microsystems with feature sizes down to the nano-scale.

These patterns can be used to form integrated optics components or be ‘developed’ by chemically etching to form three-dimensional structures like fluidic channels and micro-mechanical components. Worth noticing, sub-micron resolution can be achieved and sub-pattern smaller than the laser wavelength can be formed. 

Due to the low-energy required to pattern the glass, femtosecond laser systems consisting simply of an oscillator are sufficient to produce such micro- and nano- systems.

A 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light. The file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre).

The self-assembled nanostructures change the way light travels through glass, modifying polarisation of light that can then be read by combination of optical microscope and a polariser, similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.

The research is led by Jingyu Zhang from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and conducted under a joint project with Eindhoven University of Technology.

“We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organisations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” says Jingyu.

Like many technological leaps, the researchers are modest with future applications.  “Museums who want to preserve information or places like the national archives where they have huge numbers of documents, would really benefit.”

The Physical Optics group from the ORC presented their breakthrough paper at the photonics industry's renowned Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO’13) in San Jose. The paper, ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass’ was presented by the during CLEO's prestigious post deadline session.

SOURCE  University of Southampton

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