Nature Podcast This chunk of glass could store two million books for 10,000 years
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Feb 18, 2026 Anand Jagatia, a reporter who covered Project Silica, walks through laser-written data storage in glass and why conventional drives fail for millennial archiving. He covers how femtosecond lasers inscribe bits in borosilicate glass, three-dimensional DVD-sized stacks holding millions of books, microscopy-based readout, and the team's estimates that the data could survive 10,000 years.
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Laser-Written Glass Stores Data For Millennia
- Microsoft Research encodes data inside borosilicate glass using femtosecond laser pulses that create permanent nanoscale changes.
- The technique enables multilayer 3D storage in DVD-sized, 2 mm-thick glass with estimated lifetimes exceeding 10,000 years.
Practical Glass Choice Enables Scalability
- Project Silica uses borosilicate (Pyrex-like) glass rather than costly pure fused silica, easing manufacturing and handling.
- The team achieves hundreds of data layers in three dimensions inside a thin, DVD-sized glass plate.
Use Femtosecond Pulses For Stable Marks
- Writing uses ultra-short (femtosecond) laser pulses focused inside glass to create plasma-induced nano-explosions that permanently modify structure.
- When designing such systems, ensure precise temporal and spatial compression to achieve detectable, stable modifications.