CORDIS provides links to public deliverables and publications of HORIZON projects.
Links to deliverables and publications from FP7 projects, as well as links to some specific result types such as dataset and software, are dynamically retrieved from OpenAIRE .
Exploitable results
Archival storage of information has an enormous impact on the human culture and civilisation; since the days of the invention of printing it has been possible to store a considerable amount of information which is then available to mankind for further processing. The amount of information produced is exponential in growth; thus the requirement for storage space is also exponential in growth. One way of alleviating this problem is to find methods to compress the data while storing and uncompressing while needed. With the advent of computers, terebytes of data are being processed. Even so, the computers are hard pressed to handle this huge volume of data. Digital storage of an image at high resolution craves almost a gigabyte of disc space. Holographic storage is the most promising advanced storage solution, with a large random access memory (RAM).
Through various analytical methods, this project demonstrated that side-chain liquid crystalline polyesters are admirably suited for erasable optical storage. A grating recorded in 1992 in a film of P6a12 with its undiminishing diffraction efficiency demonstrated the potential for optical storage in these polyesters. After a thorough investigation, it was found that polyesters with 6 or 8 methylene groups in the flexible spacer, a cyano-substituted azobenzene as the photoactive chromophore in the side chain, 12 methylene groups in the acidic part of the main chain, with a molar mass between 20 000 and 70 000 are eminently suited for optical storage. Such systems have powerful archival capacity, and could be used in several applications, for example medical documents, x-ray pictures, satellite systems etc. Even though the polyesters, as they stand, are excellent for holographical storage, they are perhaps still slow. Futuristic systems would require data transfer rates of several gigabytes. Improvements in data storage might be achievable through a variety of means, which are under continued investigation.
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