Scientists at UMass Amherst and UC Berkeley have developed a new way to align nanoscale block copolymers using commercially available sapphire crystals. Got that? No? Well let me see if I can break it down a bit.
Block copolymers, which are two or more chemically dissimilar polymer chains linked together, have this habit of organizing themselves into an equidistant pattern when spread out on a thin film, a pattern that computers, and especially data storage get all hot and bothered for. The problem is, things get sloppy when the area of copolymers gets larger, making it impractical.
The sapphires come in to play because when heated to 1300 to 1500 degrees Celsius for 24 hours they reorganize their surfaces to a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges and guess what, the copolymers love it. These ridges give the copolymers a guide to follow allowing for larger areas of extremely small (I said nanoscale remember) and extremely organized patterns.
Great, now we know that but what does it all mean? It means that with features as small as 3 nanometers you can store 10 terabits of data per square inch. So something about the size of a quarter can hold about 125 gigabytes of data. Now go cram that in your camera.
