Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands have devised a way of using the angular momentum of photons in pulses of laser light to interact with a magnetic medium to change its polarity. The technique is very fast—they achieved data transfer speeds roughly 100 times that of current hard disk read-write mechanisms.
This sort of data storage has been tried before, but previous efforts have failed because the magnetic medium they attempted to use. The Dutch researchers employed a new substance composed of gadolinium, iron, and cobalt, which responded better to the laser pulses. The challenge for the team now is to reduce the size of the area on the disk affected by the laser pulse. It is currently far too wide, resulting in very low data density on the magnetic disk.
Don't expect the technology to appear on store shelves tomorrow, however. The first working prototypes of disks using this technology are likely a decade away.
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