Professor Min Gu (pictured) and his team at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Micro-Photonics are three years into a $1-million five-year project that is looking at how nanotechnology can be used to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc, report ScienceAlert.

Their ultimate aim is to be able to include as much as a petabyte (PB) – or one quadrillion bytes – of data on a single disc, an amount 20,000 times greater than the amount of data currently able to be stored on a Blu-ray Disc.

Funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council, the project aims to create these ‘next generation’ discs using a number of different techniques, the first of which involves dramatically expanding the number of layers in which data can be stored.

Dr James Chon, a senior lecturer at the centre and one of the researchers involved in the project, explains that while a typical CD is about 1.2 millimetres thick, the information recorded on it using what is now standard technology takes up less than a micron – one thousandth of a millimetre – of the CD’s thickness. “So in other words you have only used 0.1 per cent of the volume and 99.9 per cent is wasted,” he says.

While DVD technology already uses multi-layered technique – double-sided DVDs can have up to four layers (DVD18) – the researchers have already experimentally demonstrated that they can increase storage capacity up to 52 layers. “If we wanted to, we could go up to 200 and 300 layers,” says Chon.

Alongside the use of layering techniques, the project is also exploring how nanotechnology can enable data to be stored in two further ‘dimensions’ in addition to the three spatial dimensions already used – the spectral, or color, dimension and use of polarisation.

Although many issues, such as the speed at which the discs can be written on, are yet to be resolved, the researchers – who have already signed an agreement with electronics manufacturer Samsung – say the discs would have immediate applications in a range of fields and could be in commercial use within 10 years, reports ScienceAlert).

Story filed 06.04.08