Australian scientists cram 2,000 DVDs worth of information in one

After GE research scientists claimed to have discovered a way of storing 100 DVDs equivalent of information on a single standard DVD last month, Swinburne University researchers in Melbourne, Australia, yesterday claimed to have overtaken the GE team many times over.

They say they can now cram 2,000 DVDs worth of information of a single standard DVD.

While standard DVDs store information on three spatial dimensions, researchers Down Under have added two more dimensions to cram even more bits and bytes.

Using nano particles that are extremely small bits of matter, the Swinburne team added two additional dimensions – a spectral (or colour) dimension and a polarisation dimension.

With the help of gold nanorods, which they inserted onto a disc's surface, the researchera were able to create a 'colour dimension.' Since nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, it allowed researchers to record information in a range of different colour wavelengths on the same physical disc location.
The researchers' findings have been published in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature.

DVDs that are currently available in the market are recorded in a single colour wavelength using a laser.

The other dimension which they added - polarisation is even more impressive. When scientists at Swinburne projected light waves onto the disc, the direction of the electric field contained within aligned with gold nanorods which allowed researchers to record different layers of information at different angles.

According to James Chun of the university's Centre for Micro-Photonics, the polarisation can be rotated through 360 degrees which makes it possible to record at zero-degree polarisation and then record at 90 degrees polarisation with no interference between the two.

However, there are certain outstanding issues such as the speed at which the discs can be written on that need to be resolved, but researchers are confident that they will be able to put the discs will on the market in 5 to 10 years.

With that kind of storage capacity available on a single disc, analysts believe that entire TV series could be released on one disc. But there may be commercial implications to the issue they point out. For example, would it really make commercial sense to sell 22 movies on a disc if the consumer is only interested in one or only a few, given the limitations of time, preference, etc?

There could be other applications besides entertainment for instance storing medical files such as MRI's, they point out.