Sugar Cube is Memory of the Future

”Japanese researchers have managed to create a data storage device that can hold 1 Terabyte of information and is just 1 cubic centimetre in size, the same size as a cube of sugar.

Two years ago the scientists at Kyoto University discovered that glass could be used to store information optically. By using a very short pulse of light produced by a femtosecond laser to strike a glass cube containing the element samarium, small luminous dots around 400 nanometers in diameter are produced.

These tiny dots can then be layered on top of each other and be used to store information. The initial experiments had 2,000 layers of dots, which managed to store 1 Terabyte of information. ”