The science and technology of nanophotonics can help dramatically increase the capacity of optical discs. After reviewing research into next-generation optical data storage, Min Gu, Xiangping Li and Yaoyu Cao from the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have offered their perspective of the creation of exabyte-scale optical data centers. They report that developments in ’super-resolution recording‚, which allow a light-sensitive material to be exposed to a focal spot that is smaller than the diffraction limit of light, will allow the size of recorded bits to shrink to just a few nanometres in size. This would ultimately allow a single disk to store petabytes of data and thus constitute a key component in optical storage arrays for ultrahigh-capacity optical data centers.
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