University of Southampton researchers devise a way to store data forever on nanostructured glass

Five-dimensional femtosecond laser encoding, anyone?

Researchers at the University of Southampton have demonstrated a technique that enables huge amounts of data to be etched onto specially made glass and potentially stored indefinitely.

Using a 5D femtosecond laser, they say that they can encode the amounts of data onto nanostructured glass in five dimensions.

The glass has been nicknamed the "Superman crystal" because of its resemblance to the crystals from the original Superman film that hold knowledge from the planet Krypton and were the forerunners of DVDs in Metropolis.

While the technique has already been used to record the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Magna Carta and the Bible in tests, it hasn't been deployed in earnest for storing machine-readable data, yet.

"It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations," said professor Peter Kazansky from the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation: all we've learned will not be forgotten."

Each glass piece can store up to 360TB of data and will survive exposure to temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. Researchers suggest that, even if stored at a regular 190 Celsius, which is slightly cooler than Seville in August, it ought to last for 13.8 billion years. That's around about the age of the universe so far and many times the age of the human race.

This makes it higher capacity and significantly longer lasting than even IBM's most recent 220TB per inch tape storage.

Researchers are currently looking for ways to commercialise and industrialise the technique, which uses short bursts of light encoded in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres.

Reading the text with the naked eye requires a microscope and a polarising device - the researchers haven't yet built the equivilient to a DVD-RW to fully automate reading and writing.

The first version of the technology appeared in 2013 but at that point it could store only 300 kilobytes of data at a time, making it very little use for anything other than a replacement for your old Sinclair Microdrives (if they're still working, which is highly unlikely).