Could diamonds revolutionize the ways in which we store vast amounts of data? A team of physicists from City University of New York used lasers to encode and read data on diamonds’ imperfections (also known as flaws). According to a paper they published in the journal Science Advances, diamonds could potentially be used to store data in a capacity surpassing “what existing technologies can achieve”.
In the lab, the researchers experimented with what they call “a perhaps unexpected memory material you may even be wearing on your ring finger right now: diamond. On the atomic level, these crystals are extremely orderly – but sometimes defects arise”. On the blog “The Conversation”, the authors explain that they’re “exploiting these defects as a possible way to store information in three dimensions”. They explain that “though one could use natural diamonds for these applications, we use artificially lab-grown diamonds. That way we can efficiently control the concentration of nitrogen vacancy centers in the diamond”.
The researchers claim that their research “is just a beginning, but these initial results provide us a potential way of storing huge amount of data in a brand new way. We’re looking forward to transform this beautiful quirk of physics into a vastly useful technology”. In their opinion, the improvements can “add up to about 100 times enhancement in terms of bit density relative to the current DVD technology”.
In other words, it can be possible to encode all the information from a DVD into a diamond that takes up about one percent of the space.
