A new digital data storage medium, the principle of which is unique in the world, was invented by students from Nizhny Novgorod (Povolzhye district). The creation of three students of the physics and mathematics high school made it to the finals of the Google Science Fair 2013 competition.
The principle of operation of the device is based on the interaction of a laser beam with plexiglass. The children found an original application in this process, Natalia Vargina, a physics teacher for young inventors from a Nizhny Novgorod high school, told Voice of Russia:
Today there are many creations, in which they have experimentally clarified the nature of the interaction of the laser beam with plexiglass. And the children decided to use the results of this experiment, which simply shows that holes can be made in plexiglass. But the fact that this can be used for optical data storage is their own idea. The children found out how to encode the data, and now they continue to work on this topic, they think about other things, they carry out calculations, laboratory measurements.
The size of the data storage medium proposed by the students is comparable to a 1 mm thick A4 sheet of paper. On such a sheet, data of the order of 28 Terabytes can be written – 14 times more than on a computer hard drive. This storage medium has a number of significant advantages, notes one of the creators of the invention, Nikita Chernyadyev:
First of all, it is the volume of data that is recorded on a unit of surface area. The volume increases due to the increase in the density of information recording. And secondly, it is reliability. These are the two main advantages over similar existing media.
The children worked for six months to develop their invention, while they began to enthusiastically engage with information technology three years ago.
“It all started a long time ago, in the seventh grade, when we started participating in the school’s design activities,” noted 16-year-old Nikita, for whose age a few years is indeed a long time:
We will present the project at the Open Innovations conference in Moscow. We also want to take part in the ROST (Russia-Responsibility-Strategy-Technologies) competition in Nizhny Novgorod. This will allow us to then go to the IntelISEF (IntelInternationalScienceandEngineeringFair) scientific and engineering design competition in the USA.
The project of Russian students from Nizhny Novgorod has aroused the interest of the Russian Academy of Sciences: it was tested experimentally at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Now the children are developing the device. According to the young inventors, “the deadline is within two to three weeks.” The new data storage medium, as the children point out, is not intended for ordinary users but for large companies that deal with large volumes of data.
