Chinese Boffins Find Way To Use Diamonds As Super-dense And Durable Storage Medium

Researchers at China's University of Science and Technology published research this week in which they detail how they achieved record-breaking storage density of 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter by encoding information in diamonds.

To put it in context, advanced hard disk drives can achieve around one terabyte per cubic centimeter, although higher densities have been reported. Enterprise HDDs can last up to a decade. Blu-ray discs, which have similar storage density, can last longer. According to USTC, its technique for encoding data in diamonds produces both greater density and vastly greater durability.

The research, published in Nature Photonics, highlights that the breakthrough extends beyond density. It is said to offer significant improvements in write times – as little as 200 femtoseconds – and lives up to the promise that "a diamond is forever" by offering millions of years of allegedly maintenance-free storage. Diamonds are highly stable by nature and the the authors have claimed their medium could protect data for 100 years even if kept at 200°C.

High-speed readout is demonstrated with a fidelity of over 99 percent, according to the boffins.

Scientists have been eyeing diamonds as storage devices for a while. Researchers at City College of New York in 2016 claimed to be the first group to demonstrate the viability of using diamond as a platform for superdense memory storage.

They did so by exploiting defects or holes in the diamonds that gather nitrogen – known as nitrogen vacancy centers. These are points where a nitrogen atom replaces a carbon atom next to a vacant spot. These vacancy centers can exhibit fluorescent properties that are stable and can store data, when affected by a laser. No maintenance or energy source is further required.

While they weren't able to achieve a significant density, those researchers were able to provide a proof of concept, upon which the Chinese researchers have built.

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The USTC team worked with diamonds only a few millimeters long, but reckon their techniques will scale. The team was able to create multiple vacancies in diamonds by controlling the energy level of the laser as they removed carbon atoms.

Using a high-speed fluorescence imaging camera, they were able to encode the world's first time-lapse photography work – Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 Galloping Horses – through 3D stacking. Each frame occupied a space of approximately 90×70 square microns in the diamond.

Diamond is also being explored as a material for quantum networking by the likes of AWS. Meanwhile, Japanese scientists are looking into diamonds as semiconductors. ®