If Diamond Are Forever, Your Data Could Be Too

If you wear a diamond on your finger, it likely has flaws, even if you can’t see them. Don’t blame your partners for your flawed engagement rings, thank them. You could be flaunting the future of data storage on your digits. A paper published on 26 October in Science Advances shows how diamonds can be harnessed to store data for the long term. Right now, a tiny diamond – about half as long as a grain of rice and thinner than a sheet of paper – can hold a hundred times more data than a DVD. In the future, physicists could access a diamond with storage capacity a million times greater than that of a DVD. Groups all over the world are scrambling to find a place to cram all the data we’re generating taking selfies and swiping credit cards. They’ve proposed DNA, holograms, old fashioned magnetic tape and other ideas. Diamonds aren’t new to the memory game, either. They’ve been proposed for quantum data storage, which is kind of like teleportation. It’s basic storage 101 – 010101 (and so on). A diamond has a tiny, atomic sized imperfection known as nitrogen vacancy centre. These flaws occur when a stray nitrogen atom – or a few of them – sneaks in among its carbon structure. Deleting a carbon atom near the nitrogen leaves an empty space for stashing data. For the research, the team of physicists from City University of US used industrial fabricated diamond, which costs $150 – the cheapest thing in the experiment. They used laser to encode and read data on these spaces, which they treated like magnets that could repel or absorb an electron. To encode simple grayscale images like a smiley face, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger they added an electron by shining a green laser and took one away with a red laser. They read their data like a computer reads 0s and 1s, but instead of digits there was light, which indicated the presence of absence of electrons. While both use light to read data, the concept is a little different from DVD storage. A DVD is like a 2D puzzle, and this diamond technique is like a 3D model. Unlike the DVD, which has only one surface, a diamond can store data in multiple layers. This storage would also work differently than a magnetic hard drive, because diamonds, as they say, are forever. Every time you access or rewrite your hard drive, the material it’s made of degrades, and after five or 10 years, it’s dead. But defects in the diamonds don’t change, and if you do nothing, yur data could last as long as your diamond. It will sit there forever.