Researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology overcome a law of optical science to develop technology boosting DVD storage capacity-- a change in writing lasers boosts DVD storage capacity from 4.7GB to up to 1 petabyte.
The technology enables "three-dimensional optical beam lithography at nine nanometres" and acts as a turnaround to Abbe's Limit, the law discovered in 1873 by Ernst Abbe.
Abbe's Limit states light beam focused by a lens cannot produce a focal spot smaller than half of the wavelength (or 500nm) for visible light. It allowed for the development of of modern optical microscopy, but set a barrier for scientists working in the nanometer scale.
“The new technique produces a focal spot that is 1/10000 of a human hair, enabling more data to be written to disc,” Swinburne Centre for Micro-Photonics director Professor Min Gu says.