He and several other speakers at the APS meeting addressed the subject of future data storage.
Continued progress depends on improved recording media.
Dieter Weller of IBM Almaden reported on his efforts to enhance the ability of the tiny domains on the film medium to become magnetized, a parameter called magnetic anisotropy. Working with sandwiches of atom-thin layers of iron and platinum, Weller has produced a film with an anisotropy ten times that of materials used in present day hard disks. Even though the storage of data in the form of tiny magnetic orientations on a two-dimensional film keeps getting better, scientists continue to explore alternative methods. Lambertus Hesselink of Stanford described a system in which data is stored in the form of an optical interference pattern in a three-dimensional photorefractive crystal. Hesselink has actually transferred data from a computer to a holographic system and then read the data back again.