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Melody Encoded onto Plasmonic Nanostructure

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CHAMPAIGN, Ill., March 17, 2015 — With data storage capacity 5600 times greater than magnetic film, a chip made of tiny gold bow ties could be the next best place to store all your MP3s.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently created the first-ever optically encoded audio recording using a plasmonic nanostructure. Using the device as a “nano piano,” they were able to input and then play back the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

The device is made of an array of 250-nm gold bow tie nanoantennas supported on 500-nm-tall SiO2 posts. The researchers demonstrated that these pillar-supported bow tie nanoantennas (pBNAs) could be used to store sound information either as a temporally varying intensity waveform or a frequency varying intensity waveform.

pBNAs
Arrays of pillar-supported bow tie nanoantennas (pBNAs) can be used to record distinct musical notes. Courtesy of the University of Illinois.


Audio signals were recorded by using a microscope to scan a sound-modulated laser beam directly onto the bow ties. When the gold is illuminated, it melts slightly and its optical response changes.

“Originating from a plasmon-induced thermal effect, well-controlled nanoscale morphological changes allow as much as a 100-nm spectral shift from the nanoantennas,” said postdoctoral researcher Hao Chen. “By employing this spectral degree of freedom as an amplitude coordinate, the storage capacity can be improved.”

Retrieval is achieved by using the same microscope to image the recorded waveform, after which the signal is processed and played back as sound.

“Although our audio recording focused on analog data storage, in principle it is still possible to transform to digital data storage by having each bow tie serve as a unit bit 1 or 0,” Chen said. “By modifying the size of the bow tie, it’s feasible to further improve the storage capacity.”

Professor Dr. Kimani Toussaint said the technique could be of use in archival storage. The technology also holds potential for on-chip, plasmonic information processing, he said.

The research was published in Scientific Reports (doi: 10.1038/srep09125). 

For more information, visit www.illinois.edu.
Rocky Mountain Instruments - Infrared Optics MR

Published: March 2015
Glossary
nano
An SI prefix meaning one billionth (10-9). Nano can also be used to indicate the study of atoms, molecules and other structures and particles on the nanometer scale. Nano-optics (also referred to as nanophotonics), for example, is the study of how light and light-matter interactions behave on the nanometer scale. See nanophotonics.
plasmonics
Plasmonics is a field of science and technology that focuses on the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and free electrons in a metal or semiconductor at the nanoscale. Specifically, plasmonics deals with the collective oscillations of these free electrons, known as surface plasmons, which can confine and manipulate light on the nanometer scale. Surface plasmons are formed when incident photons couple with the conduction electrons at the interface between a metal or semiconductor...
Research & TechnologyAmericasIllinoisUniversity of IllinoisChampaign UrbanaKimani ToussaintHao ChennanoplasmonicsOpticsLasersMaterialspBNApillar-supported bowtie nanoantennabowtie nanoantenna

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