A new medium for two-photon volumetric data recording and playback

A new optical data storage media has been developed, which allows three-dimensional serial data storage and retrieval by two-photon excitation. The disk is essentially of a monolithic structure, and utilizes a proprietary photochromic organic fluorophore as the data storage element. This new data storage chromophore has very small linear optical differences between its two states, allowing massively multilayer data storage, and has a large Stokes shift of over 100 nm, allowing its use in very high concentrations. The thermodynamic energy barrier for isomerization in the ground state is 90 kJ mol(-1), giving adequate thermodynamic stability, and the two forms of the chromophore have large differences in their two-photon-excited fluorescence intensity, allowing data readout by two-photon microscopy.