Posted by
Alex in
Science & Tech on May 25, 2009 at 1:39 pm
There are two very exciting recent advances in nanotechnology
may soon result in a massive increase in memory capacities of your DVDs
and iPods:
Researchers
at the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology
in Victoria, Australia, created a new material that could lead to new
discs that can store 10,000 times more data than your average DVDs.
The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in
clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns
can be written and read within the same area in the material without
interfering with each other. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations
of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns
within the same area. They've further increased the storage density
to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as
many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the
journal Nature, Gu's group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit
per second.
The picture to the right shows 6 patterns written in the same area
of the nanorods using three different color and two different polarization
of lasers: Link
(Photo credit: Nature Publishing Group)
(Image: Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
University of California at Berkeley)
- Berkeley (yay! My alma mater) researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues
created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that
can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron
particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense
and highly stabile memory arrays, resulting in very long lifetime: Link
How stable is stable? Here's a chart that shows typical storage lifetimes
vs bit density for a variety of storage media. As you can see, his stuff
beats rock!
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