Researchers create DVDs with massive storage

LONDON (Reuters) - "Five-dimensional" discs with a capacity 10,000 times greater than current DVDs could be on the market within 10 years, researchers reported on Wednesday.

A team from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia said that by harnessing nanoparticles and a "polarization" dimension to existing technology, storage can be massively boosted without changing the size of a current disc.

The researchers, who have signed a deal with Samsung Electronics, said the technique had allowed them to store 1.6 terabytes of data on a disc with the potential to one day store up to 10 terabytes.

One terabyte would be enough to hold 300 feature length films or 250,000 songs.

"We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc," Min Gu, who worked on the research, said in a statement.

"These extra dimensions are the key to creating ultra-high capacity discs."

Discs currently have three spatial dimensions but using nanoparticles the researchers said they were able to introduce a spectral -- or color -- dimension as well as a polarization dimension.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Nature, created the color dimension by inserting gold nanorods -- which form so-called surface plasmons when hit by light -- onto a disc's surface.

Because nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allowed the researchers to record information in a range of different color wavelengths on the same place on the disc.