An automated system for storing large amounts of information in glass could change the future of data centres.

Our world runs on data, from the internet and readouts of countless industrial sensors to scientific data from particle colliders, and all of it must be stored safely and efficiently.

In 2014, at the University of Southampton in the UK and his colleagues showed that lasers can be used to , thus creating a data storage method that could last longer than the age of the universe.

Their method was too impractical to be scaled up to industrial size, but and his colleagues at Microsoft’s have now demonstrated a similar glass-based technology that might lead to long-lasting glass data libraries in the near future.

“Glass can withstand extreme temperatures, humidity, particulates and electromagnetic fields. On top of that, glass has a great lifespan and doesn’t require replacing every couple of years. That makes it a more sustainable medium as well. It requires very little energy to make and it’s easy to recycle when we’re done with it,” says Black.

The team’s process starts by using femtosecond lasers, which emit light pulses lasting quadrillionths of a second, to convert data into tiny structures etched into thin glass layers. When turning bits of data into these structures, the team also added extra bits that ensured fewer reading and writing errors.

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The data could be read with a combination of a microscope and a camera, whose images were then passed to a neural network algorithm that converted the information back into bits. The whole process was easily repeatable and automated, making a case for robotically operated data facilities.

The researchers managed to store 4.8 terabytes of data in a square piece of glass 120 millimetres wide and 2 millimetres thick – equivalent to roughly 37 iPhones’ worth of storage in about a third of the volume of one.

Based on accelerated ageing experiments, such as heating the glass in a furnace, the team estimated that data could remain stable and readable for more than 10,000 years at 290°C and even longer at room temperature. Additionally, the researchers tested their method with borosilicate glass, which is cheaper than standard glass, but could only accommodate less complex data.

Kazansky says the main breakthrough of Project Silica is that it offers an end-to-end system that could be scaled up to the level of data centres. The physics principles behind glass-based data storage have been known for more than a decade, but the new work confirms that it can be turned into a viable technology, he says.

Microsoft isn’t the only firm interested in pushing this technology towards the mainstream. Kazansky co-founded a company called that has, for example, stored the human genome in a piece of glass. An Austrian start-up called similarly offers to store large amounts of data in ultra-thin layers of ceramic and glass.

Still, questions remain, for instance, about the cost of integrating glass libraries into existing data centres and whether the Project Silica team can increase the capacity of its glasses, which ought to reach up to 360 terabytes based on the work of Kazansky’s team.

Black says the clearest potential applications for Project Silica’s technology right now are anywhere data must survive for centuries, such as national libraries, scientific repositories or cultural records. Working with companies such as Warner Bros. and the Global Music Vault, his team has also begun to explore storing data that is meant to be kept indefinitely and currently resides in the cloud, he says.

Kazansky says that the technology was even featured in the film Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, where the protagonist found it capacious and safe enough to trap a villainous artificial intelligence. “It is a rare moment where Hollywood’s sci-fi is actually based on our peer-reviewed reality,” he says.

An electron has been turned into a spiralling wave of mass and charge, with the help of a laser.

“Chirality, or handedness, is an interesting and still in part enigmatic feature of our universe,” says at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Chiral objects, like coils or L-shaped blocks, come in either left or right-handed forms; non-chiral ones, like circles or straight lines, do not. Many molecules and materials are naturally chiral, and whether they are right or left-handed changes how they function. But Baum and his colleagues devised a way to add chirality to something very small and elementary – a single electron.

Electrons are quantum objects, so they exhibit both particle-like and wave-like behaviour, depending on the experiment. In this one, the researchers took advantage of the electron’s waviness. They first created an extremely quick pulse of electrons, then passed this through thin ceramic membranes, where the particles encountered a special laser beam. The beam was shaped like a swirling vortex of light and, as a result, it carried a similarly shaped electromagnetic field. This field affected the wave function, or the wave properties, of each electron that passed through it.

Finally, the researchers detected these manipulated electrons and calculated the “expectation values” for the mass and charge of each – where in space you would be most likely to measure non-zero amounts of both traits. These regions of space formed shapes: three-dimensional coils that were distinctly left or right-handed.

at the University of Oregon, who has worked on earlier experiments with making chiral electron coils, says the new work is “a very sophisticated advancement of the state-of-the-art in shaping electrons”. The team demonstrated precise control over their spiralised electrons, which will be crucial to using the particles in applications like imaging or controlling existing materials, he says.

Baum and his colleagues have already confirmed that shooting a left-handed electron coil onto a right-handed gold nanostructure produces a different ricochet pattern than it does when fired onto a left-handed structure. This opens the door for using such coils to selectively affect the chiral parts of chemical compounds or electronics devices.

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Having made these odd electrons in the lab, Baum says he is now curious whether they could arise independently in nature. “We are starting to explore these possibilities.”