Created a composite polymer nanomaterial ideal for holographic storage devices

Holographic technologies are one of the most promising methods of increasing the density of optical storage devices, following the constant trend of increasing capacity while decreasing overall dimensions. And a group of researchers from the Japanese University of Electro-Communications (UEC) managed to create a new polymer composite material, which contains nanoparticles of a certain type. An optical system based on this material provides the highest optical signal level and the highest signal-to-noise ratio to date. And the use of the new nanomaterial in holographic information storage devices will allow several times to reduce the level of read-write errors, and this, in turn, will allow starting the practical use of holographic storage devices for storing large amounts of information.

Almost all optical technologies for recording and storing information use the difference in the refractive index of light by areas of the carrier material that have passed through a certain processing process. Unlike conventional technologies that use information storage on the plane of the information layer of a compact disc, for example, holographic technologies allow you to record information in the volume of three-dimensional space, increasing the information capacity of the carrier many times over. But for the high-quality operation of holographic technologies, a greater difference in the refractive index of the carrier material is required than is necessary for recording information in one plane.

Composite compounds of polymeric materials with inorganic nanoparticles have excellent parameters that meet the high criteria of holographic information recording technologies. Researchers from UEC University have already developed a number of such composite materials based on thiolene monomers. Recording and reading of information from such material was carried out using a laser beam focused at a point in space, one micron in size, and a very good signal-to-noise ratio was obtained.

Later, Japanese researchers went a little further, adding nanoparticles of a certain shape and size to the volume of the polymer material. To write and read information from such a material, two beams of laser light are required, one is a reference, and the second is a working one. With this approach, the scientists managed to achieve a sufficiently high data storage density and provide a high speed of writing and reading information.

And the final “chord” of the development of this technology was the use of transparent quartz nanoparticles in the amount of 25 percent of the total volume, evenly dispersed over a polymer material with a rather complex composition, consisting of a mixture of several types of monomers. As a result of such efforts, the level of errors in writing and reading information decreased to 10 ^ -4, and the signal-to-noise ratio exceeded 10 units.

Source: http://www.dailytechinfo.org