Yes, three-holy-terabytes (3,000-gigabytes) of data on an optical disc the size of our regular CD-R might just be possible soon! Harvard researchers have developed an “optical nano antenna” which helps focus light from an inexpensive laser onto a spot size of 40-nanometers.
To put things into perspective: CDs use lasers with a wavelength of 780-nanometers, DVDs use 650-nanometers, and HD-DVDs and Blu-ray use 405-nanometers. And conventional lenses can only focus these lights to half their wavelength. As you can see now, the 40-nanometers from the optical nano antenna is very impressive indeed! Furthermore, all it needs is a laser with 830-nanometers wavelength.
The antenna works together with two gold-coated nano rods, separated by a 30-nanometers gap, to focus the laser’s light. Pictured above is a computer simulation of the rods.
While the Harvard guys work on weeding out any existing hurdles, I guess we’ll have to stick to Blu-ray and HD-DVDs.
October 2nd, 2006 at 1:21 am
Shit, thats awsome!
October 2nd, 2006 at 3:20 am
It’s cool that we will be able to fit that much data on a CD.
Do you know if the physical medium will be that of a normal CD, or if they have to create a new medium to accomodate the volume of data? I always thought there were other limitations to CDs than just the wavelength of the lasers used.