News Researchers create photonic jet storage

[CardJoe]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06...-jet-storage/1

A team at Northwestern University in Illinois has published results of work into creating removable optical storage based around photonic jet technology with massive capacity.

[bowman]

'The main drawback with commercialisation of the technology isn't in the manufacturing stage – the glass sphere required for the generation of the photonic jet is around two micrometers, well within current manufacturing capabilities – but in the execution: the sphere which focusses the light beam would be required to hover somewhere in the region of two hundred nanometres above the rapidly spinning disc without ever coming into contact with its surface. To put that into perspective, an average size human hair is 80,000 nanometres in width.'

Uh - seeker heads on modern hard disks are twenty times closer to the platter than that. Give the tech to the HDD companies, they'll be happy to make it work and sell it. Maybe they'll get the platter drive to last longer against the SSD juggernaut.

[will.]

Where do they get all those photonic torpedoes from?

[Dr. Strangelove]

Originally Posted by bowman

Uh - seeker heads on modern hard disks are twenty times closer to the platter than that.

Hmm i think the biggest problem with the distance (and the biggest difference between drive platters and optical media) is that optical media is not all that stable we all know that CD/DVD's alter shape over time, so I guess an old disk in this system could hit the prism due to the material shifting. Also platters are solidly mounted inside a HD the same cannot be said for optical media, unless they use some sort of permanent caddies.

[DXR_13KE]

Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove

permanent caddies.

now there's an idea....

i would love to see holographic media take over.....

[Javerh]

Why does the disc have to revolve? Place the disc on a lens made of spheres that focuses the jet. Have the reader revolve relative to the focusing lens. This way the disc doesn't need to be mounted assuming the reader can compensate for the mis-aligment of the disc when it is inserted.

[johnmustrule]

-Because making disks out of spheres is both economically exspensive an the disk would only read where the spheres where focused eliminating the increased density given by the small wavelength beam and thus storage would go down in capacity instead of up.

-Hardrives are exspensive to produce due to their precise nature and manufacturing optical media to such precision would negate the whole "bang for the buck" purpose.