TB per carat? Data diamonds!

The idea comes from a Science Advances paper publicised in the New York Times. The abstract says: "Negatively charged nitrogen vacancy (NV-) center in diamond is the focus of widespread attention for applications ranging from quantum information processing to nanoscale metrology. One intriguing possibility is the long-term storage of information, a notion we hereby introduce using NV-rich, type 1b diamond. As a proof of principle, we use multicolor optical microscopy to read, write, and reset arbitrary data sets with two-dimensional binary bit density comparable to present DVD technology. Leveraging on the singular dynamics of NV− ionization, we encode information on different planes of the diamond crystal with no cross-talk, hence extending the storage capacity to three dimensions." Will we be measuring TB/carat? Read the full text here. ®