We love 4K Blu-ray, but scientists are on the verge of an optical media breakthrough: a research team in Shanghai describes how to store 200,000 GB (200 TB or 16 petabytes) on a single disk using "3D nanoscale" storage in a research paper published in the journal Nature

The technique uses a photosensitive material called AIE-DDPR and two types of optical lasers (a blue laser with a wavelength of 480 nm and an orange laser with a wavelength of 592 nm) to read data stored on the disk A green 515-nm laser and a red 639-nm laser are needed to write data to the disk

While traditional storage technologies use two dimensions, the new optical technology uses three dimensions and can have up to 100 readable layers

Best of all, scientists say that current disc manufacturing plants can be used for this new technology, and blank discs can be created in about six minutes

While movie fans may dream of the day when they can get their hands on an 8K Blu-ray (one that requires only about 1TB of storage), the Shanghai research team sees this breakthrough optical media as a storage solution for big data centers that need to hold large amounts of information

Currently, large data centers can take up a huge amount of space due to the current limitations of optical media However, if they could all be switched to AIE-DDPR disks, they could be significantly reduced from the size of a soccer stadium to the size of a room

But moviegoers and gamers should not dismiss the technology just yet: the lead author of this paper, Professor Min Gu of Shanghai University of Science and Technology (Optical, Electrical, and Computer Engineering), believes that this new technology can be manufactured on a commercial scale

"It took us 10 years to find this kind of material," Prof Gu told IEEE

"In particular, the difficulty was how the write and read processes interact in a three-dimensional geometry"

Now that the search for the material is over, Gu's team is responsible for the breakthrough Unfortunately, however, this discovery came at a time when physical media sales were declining overall

However, with unstable Internet speeds across the country and several services like Amazon and Netflix raising the price of access to 4K streaming, physical media is the most stable way to unlock the best 4K TV potential

One can only hope that optical media will survive long enough to see this innovation