A record, and a immense hope for IT : Chinese researchers have succeeded in engrave an exceptional amount of data into a diamondby guaranteeing their preservation for millions of years ! How did they do it? In which areas could this new technology be used?
1850 gigas per cubic centimeter of diamond
It is using lasers that this team of researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, succeeded in insert information into a diamond. Certain techniques had already made it possible to encode data in diamonds using laser pulses, but this is the first time that such a storage density has been achieved: 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter of diamond!
The equivalent of 1850 gigabytes of datato be highlighted with known storage media: thus, a diamond optical disc the size of a standard Blu-ray would make it possible to store 100 terabytes of data, or as much as 2000 Blu-rays! In addition, the advantage of this technique is also to be able to keep this data much longer.
Unlike Blu-ray which only guarantees around ten years of data life, these diamond disks would make it possible to envisage conservation for millions of years at room temperature! A revolution, extraordinary longevity, “without requiring any maintenance”, according to Ya Wang, co-author of the study, who could make this data “eternal data”.
Archiving revolutionized
THE laser pulses used by these researchers are ultrarapidesto allow certain carbon atoms in the diamond to move: this then creates empty spaces the size of an atomhaving a stable brightness level. It is in these spaces that scientists stored the information.
And then it’s thanks to their brightness that the data is read and restoredwith in the tests carried out an accuracy and completeness greater than 99%: an extremely effective technique, as long as the internal data storage structures are stabilized, specify the researchers. But an expensive techniquewe will therefore have to reduce its costs to find economic viability.
If for the moment, this technical feat involves small diamond samples, a few millimeters long, it will soon be applied to larger supports in future tests. Enough to allow a revolution for government agencies, libraries and research institutes dedicated to archiving and data preservation.
Article references:
Terabit-scale high-fidelity diamond data storage. Nature Photonics (2024). Zhou, J. et al.
With record storage density, diamond could allow data to be preserved forever. Geo
