Nano Pendulum Lasers--entire library on one DVD

[XEagleDriver]

Heard a radio program on "Nano Pendulum" lasers which could enable future DVD's to hold an entire library, vice only one movie .

Not in a store-near-you anytime soon, but it would be pretty cool.
Except for the load time of the 1st generation Sony/Panny/Toshiba/etc. "nano pendulum" player!


Excerpt below, followed by a link to the article:


"Researchers say they have built the world's smallest laser — one a thousand times smaller than what's available today. And today's lasers are already small enough to fit on a computer chip.

These new types of lasers open up all sorts of new possibilities for new technologies. And they break down the conventional wisdom about how small lasers can be.

Standard theory has it that lasers can only be miniaturized so far, because to create a laser beam, the light literally bounces around inside of a chamber. Since a light wave has a certain length, it essentially needs room to turn around. But six years ago, Mark Stockman at Georgia State University started thinking outside the box.

"I got an idea to create a laser whose size is not limited to conventional limitation of laser," he says.

Stockman realized that a rapidly vibrating electron, sitting on the surface of a tiny piece of metal, could actually produce laser light.

"This is a nano pendulum, basically. It can be confined to almost any small place."

. . .

And those real applications could include future generations of computer storage. Today's lasers can burn a whole movie onto a DVD. And, Zhang says there's plenty of room for improvement.

For example, you can use this to make a very high density DVD recorder. You may be able to store an entirely library on one disk."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112416498

Cheers,
XEagleDriver

 

[BMXTRIX]

That's a pretty nifty technology. I don't see much A/V implications from it, but computing definitely will have a lot going on. The hard part with A/V is that Blu-ray is already 6 times the resolution of DVD, and is having troubles getting a foothold on the market. So, another optical disc format is not likely in the marketplace for consumers.

If they can figure out how to implement this with more physical storage in some way, then as a media server technology it could be phenomenal.

Still waiting on my 1TB iPhone with QuadCore 3Ghz+ speed.

 

[GlocksRock]

Very interesting, I just love how technology is continually improving in such an exponentional fashion.

 

[lsiberian]

seems pretty interesting

I'm not surprised to be honest though. However burning a disc like this may prove very difficult.

I think you're gonna see some type of flash memory take over the market in the near future. As gates get smaller and cheaper we are going to really see this take over for conventional hard drives in most machines.