ACM TechNews

The Library of Congress in Your Wrist Watch?

University of California, Riverside (12/20/07) Lovekin, Kris

University of California, Riverside professor Sakhrat Khizroev is researching lasers that could eventually lead to a 10-terabit hard drive only one-square-inch in size, 50 times the data density of today's magnetic storage technology. Khizroev, along with University of Houston professor Dmitri Litvinov, has developed a nanolaser that can concentrate light as small as 30 nanometers, which is molecular in size for many substances. The nanolaser can also focus 250 nanowatts of power, enough to ensure effective information storage. The next objective is to refine the nanolaser to produce light beams as small as five or 10 nanometers. The technology used to manufacture the nanolasers was adapted by Khizroev's lab from technology commonly used in semiconductor manufacturing diagnostics. Khizroev says there are still several challenges, including lubricating tiny parts and integrating the nanolaser with a recording head, but he says the 10-terabit hard drive will be a near-term innovation, perhaps in as little as two years. Long term, Khizroev says the use of photochromatic proteins with nanolasers should help create nanocomputers capable of storing increasingly large amounts of data in smaller places, and proteins paired with nanolasers should also impact energy harvesting and a variety of medical applications.

http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=1739

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