Use diamonds as 'eternal memory card'

American scientists have found a way to permanently store the amount of information equivalent to hundreds of DVDs in a small diamond sized grain of rice and thinner than a paper.

This is the defect-based data storage technology in diamond crystals, according to the New York Times. Some nitrogen atoms can squeeze between the diamond's carbon lattice structure. Destroying a carbon atom next to nitrogen creates a space that can store data.

From this idea, a group of physicists from New York University, USA, used lasers to encode and read data in these small spaces. They have magnet-like properties - pulling or pushing electrons when laser is illuminated.

Photo of physicists Einstein and Schoerdinger encoded and stored on diamonds.(Photo: Carlos A. Meriles / Siddharth Dhomkar).

When data is needed, they use green lasers to add electrons to the gaps and red lasers to get the electrons out, equivalent to two binary values ​​0 and 1. The process of reading data is similar to a computer binary numbers, but here is the light indicating the presence or absence of electrons.

"Unlike a DVD that can only write data to a 2D plane, this diamond-using technique can store data on multiple surfaces, like a stack of DVDs," Jacob Henshaw, a member of The team said.

Now a grain-sized diamond can store the same amount of information as hundreds of DVDs. In the future physicists can increase this capacity to the equivalent of millions of DVDs or more.

In addition, data stored by this method may exist permanently. With the current magnetic hard drive, each time to access and record new data, its durability will gradually decrease and completely fail after 5-10 years.

Defects in diamond lattices do not change over time, meaning that stored data is permanently preserved.

"You have no way to change it. The data will be there forever," said Siddharth Dhomkar, the study's lead author.

This is a data storage technology based on defects in diamond crystals.

But veterans of data storage, such as Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International, still doubt the feasibility of the technology. He said that only those who work in the new lab are familiar with the new storage technology, and diamonds are always very expensive, even with imperfect diamonds.

"It may take 10 years for this technology to be widely used," he said.

According to researchers, artificial diamonds costing $ 150 are the cheapest in their experiments.

"The bigger the diamond, the more crystals there will be to store information," Henshaw said.

In addition, the team said the idea of ​​storing this data could also be used on any material with a diamond-like crystal defect. The study was published in Science Advances magazine on October 26.