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Table of contents
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Table of contents

0:00
Intro
0:42
What is optical storage
1:23
Why did compact discs die
2:47
What did they do
3:45
Advancements
5:14
Sponsor Message
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science without the gobbledygoook
hossenfelder
science
science news
tech
technology
tech news
computer science
computing
optical storage
DVDs
CDs
compact disks
storage data
disk space
memory capactiy
science news sabine
technology news
memory
memory storage
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Subtitles
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00:00:01
What do we want? Better memory. 
00:00:03
When do we want it? Want what? Joking aside, I have a two Terabyte  
00:00:08
hard disk and used to think that’s a lot. Then  I bought a new video camera and it’s clogged my  
00:00:14
disk in no time. And yes there’s cloud storage  but you know, it’s not actually in the clouds.  
00:00:20
They still store it on some thing down on earth.  And besides that, it’d take me forever to upload.
00:00:27
So I was thrilled to see this recent  new paper in Nature about a new optical  
00:00:32
storage method that could bring disk memory  into the Petabyte range. Petabytes. That’s  
00:00:39
a thousand Terabytes. Let’s have a look. The new technology is an old technology,  
00:00:45
it’s optical storage. Some of you may even  be old enough to remember optical storage.  
00:00:51
We used to carry music around on those things  called compact disks and let me just say you  
00:00:57
had to walk very carefully if you didn’t want  to listen to the same sentence a thousand times. 
00:01:03
Later we put movies on these things called DVDs. 
00:01:08
We have a neighbour who’s hung her old DVDs up on  the balcony to scare off the pigeons. True story.
00:01:15
These compact disks were usually made of some  kind of plastic with a coating, which gave them  
00:01:21
their shiny appearance. They worked by using a  laser to burn the information into the coating,  
00:01:28
and then read it out again. Actually, a  pretty nice idea, quite straight forward.
00:01:34
Why did compact disks die? They  were outcompeted by hard drives  
00:01:38
that can store information packed much more  densely. The information density on compact  
00:01:44
disks or any optical storage is ultimately  limited by the frequency of the laser light,  
00:01:50
for visible light that’s a few hundred nanometres.  In modern flash drives the information is stored  
00:01:56
in little magnetizable cells that are just a  few atoms in size and can be as small as 10  
00:02:02
nanometers or so. They can store much more data in  the same space, hence the death of compact disks.
00:02:09
But maybe they’ll soon make a comeback. Because  in this new work a group of researchers from China  
00:02:15
figured out how to write data in multiple layers  on a disk with lasers and read them out again. 
00:02:22
They say this could work up to hundreds of  layers, which would be a huge increase in  
00:02:27
memory capacity. They say that a single disk of  this type could store as much as a Petabit. Yes,  
00:02:34
a bit isn’t the same as a byte, but  then this was only a prototype. They  
00:02:38
also envision that in data centres the disks  could further be stacked into arrays that  
00:02:44
could each hold exabits. Sounds good  but just exactly what did they do?
00:02:50
This new work is really a combination  of several advances. Partly they made  
00:02:55
it work because they have a synthetic  material that can be modified in a very  
00:03:00
targeted way by changing how its polymers  are linked. They can write at a certain  
00:03:05
depth in the material by focusing  the laser on one particular spot.
00:03:10
They actually use two lasers, one that initiates  a change of the molecular property of the disk,  
00:03:17
the second one that terminates it, leaving behind  an altered region. This region can later be read  
00:03:23
out by causing it to emit light with yet another  laser and that can then be detected. So, to write,  
00:03:29
you locally change the property of the material  with lasers. To read, you cause it to emit light.
00:03:36
The other advancement that they make  use of is that this two laser method  
00:03:40
also allows them to encode structures below the  
00:03:43
wave-length of the lasers. This also makes  it possible to pack the data more densely. 
00:03:49
I guess it also helps that they were  working with femtosecond that prevents  
00:03:53
them from melting the entire disk to a pool  of goo before they’re done working with it.
00:03:58
Writing to and reading data from  the disk actually works very nicely,  
00:04:03
as you can see in this video. What you  see here is a scan through the layers.  
00:04:08
They have alternatingly encoded the acronyms  of their institute and the university and you  
00:04:13
can see that they are pretty clearly  readable. The distance between two  
00:04:18
layers is just about 1 micrometre. So you  could pack 1000 of them into a millimetre. 
00:04:25
That said, there is some way to go from there  to commercialization. First and most importantly  
00:04:30
when it comes to storing data it’s not just  the density of the storage that matters,  
00:04:36
it also matters how quickly you can write  the data and and read it out. They didn’t  
00:04:41
say anything about that, but I assume since this  is a prototype it’s fairly slow. Then there’s the  
00:04:47
question how much energy that takes, and also,  where do you get a femtosecond laser from.
00:04:53
Then again, you know, this entire area of  technology is currently evolving so quickly,  
00:04:58
these challenges might be possible to  overcome given a few years’ time. So who  
00:05:03
knows maybe compact disks will make a comeback  in the not too far future. And inevitably the  
00:05:09
day will come when we’ll all record our  entire life in 8K, I can’t wait for it.
00:05:15
Watching science videos is all well and fine and  I don't need to complain you're doing it. But it's  
00:05:21
not a good way to actually learn something  new. If you want to learn something new,  
00:05:26
you need to actively engage with the topic. A free  and easy way to do this is on Brilliant.org who've  
00:05:33
been sponsoring this video. On Brilliant, you find  courses on a large variety of topics in science,  
00:05:39
computer science, and mathematics. It's a fresh  and new approach to learning that makes growing  
00:05:45
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00:05:51
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00:05:57
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00:06:10
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00:06:16
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00:06:27
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00:06:33
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00:06:39
Brilliant has to offer for 30 days, and the first  200 subscribers using this link will also get 20%  
00:06:46
off the annual premium subscription.  Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow.

Description:

Explore courses in mathematics, science, and computer science with Brilliant. First 200 to use our link https://brilliant.org/s/partners/sabine/ will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Memory storage technology has come a long way from compact disks. Or has it? In a recent paper, scientists report they were able to fit petabytes of memory onto a compact disk using new laser technologies and advanced material design. Is this the future of data storage? Let’s have a look. Learn more here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06980-y?error=cookies_not_supported&code=eaf4b119-0295-4499-a565-696ffdad09ec 🤓 Check out my new quiz app ➜ https://quizwithit.com/ 💌 Support me on Donatebox ➜ https://donorbox.org/swtg 📝 Transcripts and written news on Substack ➜ https://sciencewtg.substack.com/ 👉 Transcript with links to references on Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/Sabine 📩 Free weekly science newsletter ➜ https://sabinehossenfelder.com/newsletter/ 👂 Audio only podcast ➜ https://open.spotify.com/show/0MkNfXlKnMPEUMEeKQYmYC 🔗 Join this channel to get access to perks ➜ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw/join 🖼️ On instagram ➜ https://www.facebook.com/unsupportedbrowser

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