French physicists claim breakthrough in ultra-fast data access
May 31, 2009French physicists said on Sunday they had used ultra-fast lasers that could accelerate storage and retrieval of data on hard discs by up to 100,000 times, pointing the way to a new generation of IT wizardry.
The research builds on achievements that earned the 2007 Nobel physics prize for Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany, who ushered in a revolution in miniaturised storage in the 1990s.
Fert and Gruenberg discovered that tiny changes in magnetic fields can yield a large electric output.
These differences in turn cause changes in the current in the readout head that scans a hard disk to spot the ones and zeroes in which data is stored.
That discovery opened the way to "spintronics", a form of electronics that uses not only electrical charge but also the spin of electrons in individual atoms to provide a more compact, denser storage on hard drives.
But reading and writing data through spintronics has been hampered by the relative slowness of magnetic sensors.
In a study published in the specialist journal Nature Physics, a team led by Jean-Yves Bigot of the Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry in Strasbourg employed a "femtosecond" laser, using ultra-fast bursts of laser light, to alter electron spin and thus speed up retrieval and storage.
"Our method is called the photonics of spin, because it is photons [particles of light] that modify the state of the electrons' magnetisation" on the storage surface, Bigot told AFP.
Data is retrieved with a burst that lasts just a millionth of a billionth of a second, said Bigot.
Femtosecond lasers currently measure around 30 centimetres (12 inches) by 10 centimetres (four inches) which means they are too big for consumer electronics, he cautioned.
Bigot added, though, that their miniaturisation is likely to be achieved over the next decade.
IBM, Hitachi and other corporations are "extremely interested" by the research, Bigot said.
(c) 2009 AFP
Apr 30, 2007 |
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Arg.. excellent news article.
All of the energy density changes! The fact that the energy change of less high-density energy. Density is the key. The energy changes in space, which does not change. All the time, explosive energy in space which does not change.
FREQUENCY
Density changes
Do not miss this!
If you want to physics theory of everything!
Even if a laser unit is 4 inches by 4 inches, that kind of speed using current hard drive technology could be a huge leap for server storage systems. Increase the size of the discs to match, and you could have an high capacity, high speed drive that any enterprise might snap up for numerous applications.
holographics/spintronics.
Patented back in 1998.
Nothing new here.
Actually, it does in relation to the control board and the read/write heads, especially if you're using a laser to do it, because the emitter's size, itself, is limited by Moore's law, which has actually been blown out of the water a few times, one of which was with Nvidia and their GPU about 5 years ago, in which they nearly tripled the amount of transistors on a chip in less than a year. He would have been more correct to say "at least double" when he authored his "law".
Incidentally, am I the only one that hates the fact so many scientific laws get named after their creator?
Moore's Law
Mohr's Law
The Eisenhofer Principle
The Oskowitz Theory
I know all these guys are arrogant scientists, but why do we have to remember their names? Create a central registry where the author(s) names are stored and give it a practical name so it's easy to remember which ones are which?!
Can't call a theory a law...
It would be Ricochet's Self-Named Scientific Theory Theory
Theories do not become elevated to laws or "thruths" once they become widely accepted or anything like that; it's not a matter of confidence level, it's a matter of old versus new nomenclature.
What we now call a theory would have been called a physical law a few hundred years ago.