Has Optical Storage's Era Passed? Scientists Revive It with 3D Light

In March 2026, Chinese researchers revived the concept, encoding three light properties—amplitude, phase, and polarization—into one holographic page. This yields up to 27 states per pixel versus the usual two, using a phase modulator for encoding and TriDecode-Net neural net for reading.

On 1 mm-thick PQ/PMMA photopolymer, bit error rates (BER) ranged 0.009–0.028. The method pairs with multiplexing for thousands of overlaid pages in volume.

Photopolymers store data for decades without power. Theoretical density hits hundreds of terabytes per cubic centimeter, potentially petabytes with advances.

It's a prototype now, but random access could challenge tapes seriously.

The study appeared in Optica on March 26, 2026.

Source: Ruixian Chen, Jinyu Wang, Hao Wu et al. Encoding and decoding of multidimensional optical field modulation in holographic data storage. Optica 13, 591–601 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.586593