SERODS: A new medium for high-density optical data storage

A new optical data storage technology based on the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) effect has been developed for high-density optical memory and three-dimensional data storage. With the surface-enhanced Raman optical data storage (SERODS) technology, the molecular interactions between the optical layer molecules and the nanostructured metal substrate are modified by the writing laser, changing their SERS properties to encode information as bits. Since the SERS properties are extremely sensitive to molecular nano-environments, very small "spectrochemical holes" approaching the diffraction limit can be produced for the writing process. The SERODS device uses a reading laser to induce the SERS emission of molecules on the disk and a photometric detector tuned to the frequency of the Raman spectrum to retrieve the stored information. The results illustrate that SERODS is capable of three-dimensional data storage and has the potential to achieve higher storage density than currently available optical data storage systems.