“Super Disc” Unveiled: China Achieves a Major Breakthrough in the Field of Optical Storage

Release Date:

2024-02-23

　SHANGHAI, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) — By reporters Zhang Jiansong and Sun Qing: A “super‑optical disc,” with a storage capacity tens of thousands of times that of a conventional optical disc and hundreds of times that of a standard hard drive, has been developed at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This breakthrough holds significant implications for China’s efforts to master critical core technologies in the field of information storage and to achieve sustainable development of the digital economy.

　　“Super Disc” represents a groundbreaking achievement in the research on ultra‑large‑capacity, super‑resolution three‑dimensional optical storage, attained through close collaboration between the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and institutions such as Shanghai Tech University. On the 22nd, the international academic journal Nature published the related research findings.

　　According to Researcher Ruan Hao of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, one of the paper’s corresponding authors, storage is one of the cornerstones of the digital economy. Optical storage technology boasts unique advantages—environmental friendliness and energy efficiency, security and reliability, and long lifespan—making it ideally suited for the low-cost, long-term storage of massive amounts of data. However, constrained by the diffraction limit of optics, the maximum capacity of conventional commercial optical discs remains at the hundred-gigabyte level.

　　Developing a technology that can simultaneously achieve super-resolution writing, super-resolution reading, three-dimensional storage, and long‑lifetime media has been a pressing global challenge in the field of optical storage for over the past decade. In 2012, another corresponding author of this paper, Academician Min Gu of Shanghai University of Technology, proposed the concept of a dual-beam super-resolution optical storage principle.

　　After seven years of relentless effort to overcome formidable challenges, the “Super Disc” research team has leveraged an internationally pioneering dual-beam–controlled aggregation-induced emission super-resolution optical storage technology. Experimentally, they have for the first time surpassed the limits imposed by the diffraction limit in both data writing and reading, achieving super-resolution data storage with a spot size of 54 nm and a track pitch of 70 nm. They have also demonstrated multi-layer recording up to 100 layers, yielding an equivalent single-disc capacity on the petabyte scale. Accelerated aging tests indicate that the disc medium has a lifespan exceeding 40 years.

　　The Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics is a key national research hub for storage materials and technologies. According to a responsible official at the institute, the development of the “Super Disc” has successfully demonstrated both the principle and experimental validation of dual-beam super-resolution three-dimensional optical storage; however, substantial progress remains before industrialization can be achieved. The research team will accelerate breakthroughs in original innovation and critical technologies, advance the integration and industrialization of ultra‑high‑capacity optical storage, and expand its cross‑disciplinary applications in areas such as optical microscopy, optical display, and optical information processing.

[Editor-in-charge: Zhang Yanfang]

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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