Long-term data storage in diamond

Although most work so far has focused on the NV– optical and spin properties, control of the charge state promises complementary opportunities. One intriguing possibility is the long-term storage of information. Our group is presently using multi-color optical microscopy to read, write, and reset arbitrary data sets in diamond with 2-D binary bit density comparable to present digital-video-disk (DVD) technology. Leveraging on the singular dynamics of NV– ionization, we encode information on different planes of the diamond crystal with no cross talk, hence extending the storage capacity to three dimensions.

Diamond as a three-dimensional read/write memory. (a) Starting from a blank ensemble of NV- centers (1), information can be written (2), erased (3), and rewritten (4). In (2) and (4) images are imprinted via a red laser scan with a variable exposure time per pixel. Note the gray scale in the resulting images corresponding to multi-valued (as opposed to binary) encoding. The same scale bar applies to all four images. (b) Information can be stored and accessed in three dimensions, as demonstrated in the figure for the case of a three-level stack. From Dhomkar et al., submitted.
Diamond as a three-dimensional read/write memory. (a) Starting from a blank ensemble of NV- centers (1), information can be written (2), erased (3), and rewritten (4). In (2) and (4) images are imprinted via a red laser scan with a variable exposure time per pixel. Note the gray scale in the resulting images corresponding to multi-valued (as opposed to binary) encoding. The same scale bar applies to all four images. (b) Information can be stored and accessed in three dimensions, as demonstrated in the figure for the case of a three-level stack. From Dhomkar et al., submitted.

Ongoing work in our group is aimed at correlating the center’s charge state and nuclear spin polarization of the nitrogen host as a route to sub-diffraction data storage. In combination with super-resolution microscopy techniques, control of individual NVs within a dense ensemble promises a storage capacity exceeding 1017 bytes/cm3, several orders of magnitude above present technology.