New Graphene Oxide Breakthrough May Advance Storage Tech

A new breakthrough in grapheme based discs could signal the dawn of a new storage medium. Researcher with Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology say that they have developed a new graphene oxide polymer composite that has disruptive potential.

The researchers, Xiangping Li, Qiming Zhang, Xi Chen and Professor Min Gu published their findings in Scientific Reports, demonstrating the new material’s usefulness in multimode optical recording.

“Conventionally, information is recorded as binary data in a disc. If the disc is broken, the information cannot be retrieved,” Director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne, Professor Min Gu, said in a statement. “This is a major operation cost in big data centres, which consist of thousands of disc arrays with multiple physical duplicates of data. The new material allows the development of super-discs, which will enable information to be retrieved – even from broken pieces.”

The technology could have awesome potential for the emerging big data technology trend where storage sprawl threatens to spiral out of control due to data replication requirements, and other fail-safe maneuvers that create bloat in the datacenter. While sounding too good to be true, the researchers say that they’ve demonstrated the potential for the graphene oxide polymer composite as a storage medium.

Per the Swinburne University of Technology statement:

“To demonstrate the feasibility of the mechanism, the researchers encoded the image of a kangaroo in a computer generated hologram. The hologram was then rendered as a three-dimensional recording to the graphene oxide polymer. The encrypted patterns in the hologram could not be seen as a normal microscope image, but could be retrieved in the diffracted mode.”

“The giant refractive index of this material shows promise for merging data storage with holography for security coding,” said Professor Gu. “This exciting feature not only boots the level of storage security, but also helps reduce the operation costs of big data centers that rely on multiple physical duplicates to avoid data loss.”

Similar to graphene, the one atom thick sheet of crystalline carbon known for its properties as a strong, light, flexible and nearly transparent material that is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, graphene oxide adds a fluorescent property to the mix that the researchers have been able to manipulate for bioimaging and multimode optical recording.

Per the SUT statement:

By focusing an ultrashort laser beam onto the graphene oxide polymer, the researchers created a 10-100 times increase in the refractive-index of the graphene oxide along with a decrease in its fluorescence. (The refractive index is the measure of the bending of light as it passes through a medium.)

“The unique feature of the giant refractive-index modulation together with the fluorescent property of the graphene oxide polymer offers a new mechanism for multimode optical recording,” Professor Gu said.

The promising material is also expected to have applications in flat screen TV and solar cell technology.

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