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Diamonds are forever: Gems can store data and never degrade

ANTWERP, BELGIUM - OCTOBER 31: A diamond factory employee sorts polished diamonds October 31, 2002 in Antwerp, Belgium. (Photo by Paul O'Driscoll/Getty Images)
[A diamond factory employee sorts polished diamonds October 31, 2002 in Antwerp, Belgium. (Photo by Paul O’Driscoll/Getty Images)]

Since the mid-19th century, diamonds have become the standard of jewel used to adorn engagement rings.

But in the future, they may serve a more practical purpose, storing our selfies, videos, music, work documents and other data that we use on a daily basis.

A new study published on Wednesday in Science Advances demonstrates how flaws in the precious stones can be harnessed to store information over long periods of time.

According to the New York Times, current technology can be used to hold about 100 times more data than a DVD in a tiny diamond, about half the length of a grain of rice and thinner than a sheet of a paper.

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But researchers believe that number could eventually jump to one million times greater.

Unlocking the potential storage capacity of diamonds begins with atomic-sized flaws known as nitrogen-vacancy centres. These imperfections arise when a nitrogen atom takes up a spot in a diamond’s carbon structure. Getting rid of a carbon atom near that flaw leaves a cavity that is ideal for storing data.

The new paper outlined how a team of physicists from City University of New York used lasers to encode and draw information from these cavities.

Jacob Henshaw, a graduate student who help with the study, told the Times that while the process is reminiscent of DVD storage (in that it uses light to read the information stored in the diamond’s flaws), it is more complex.

“A DVD is like a 2-D puzzle, and this diamond technique is like a 3-D model,” he said. Unlike the DVD, which has only one surface, a diamond can store data in multiple layers, like a whole stack of DVDs.

There’s also another major difference between the technology and other modern storage devices: diamonds are forever.

Hard disk drives, which are coated with magnetic material, degrade every time data is accessed or rewritten, until after five or 10 years, it’s no longer usable.

Meanwhile, the imperfections in diamonds remain static, meaning that data stored on them could last as long as you’d like.

“There is no way you can change it. It will sit there forever,” Siddharth Dhomkar, the leader author of the paper, told the Times.

The researchers said that the method can be applied to any diamond with an imperfection or any material with the same flaw.

“The bigger the diamond, the more defects, the more places to put information,” explained Henshaw.