Posts Tagged ‘optical’
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December 2nd, 2009
Catch a rainbow
Catching a rainbow might sound like the storyline of a children’s fantasy adventure, but scientists in the US have done just that using glass and gold. See New Scientist for more on this story. Long-term the phenomenon may have relevance for optical computing and electronics.
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May 21st, 2009
Your DVD library on one disc?
A new paper published in Nature and reported here on the BBC has offered the future prospect of storing a complete DVD library on one sngle disc. The research, published by a team at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, says that by adding gold nanomaterials and a “polarisation” dimension to existing technology, storage can be massively boosted without changing the size of a current disc .
W
hen polarized light from a laser is fired onto the gold nanorods it affects only the rods whose orientation matches the direction of polarization, causing them to become spherical. Its through this principle that data can be recorded. At the same time, gold nanorods respond much more efficiently than spherical nanoparticles to low-energy lasers, the so-called ’lightning rod effect’. So the team use a low-energy laser to scan the surface and see which areas have been melted and which haven’t, thereby reading the data.Apparently, the researchers have signed a deal with Samsung Electronics and say that there is the potential to one day store up to 10 terabytes of data on one disc.
Whilst this paper represents another emerging application for gold nanorods, I believe a key challenge for the scientific community is to improve the yields and scale of gold nanorod production such that these are viable commercial materials.
Richard Holliday
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