{
  "slug": "optical-storage-voxel",
  "term": "Optical storage voxel",
  "aliases": [
    "laser-written storage voxel"
  ],
  "definition": "An optical storage voxel is a localized modification inside a transparent medium whose measurable optical properties encode a data symbol.",
  "note": "A voxel is a physical recording element, not necessarily one bit; distinguish its symbol alphabet from user capacity after coding and engineering overhead [silica2023].\n\nGlass-storage designs use different optical responses, so voxel, phase voxel and birefringent voxel are not interchangeable descriptions of the same readout mechanism [silica2026].\n\nWriter compatibility: five glasses in a 2026 screening study formed voxels but did not provide the emission response required by its energy-control loop; rejection was specific to that tested feedback method [materials2026].",
  "status": "research",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [],
  "related": [
    "glass-storage",
    "error-correcting-code",
    "holographic-storage"
  ],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "silica2023",
      "title": "Anderson et al. Project Silica: Towards Sustainable Cloud Archival Storage in Glass. SOSP 2023, sections 3-7.",
      "url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ProjectSilica-SOSP23.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "silica2026",
      "title": "Microsoft Research Project Silica Team. Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage. Nature 650 (2026).",
      "url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "observatory",
      "title": "Hesela: Glass Data Storage, mechanisms and research evidence.",
      "url": "https://hesela.com/tech/glass-storage/",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "materials2026",
      "title": "Lawson et al. Property-driven analysis of glasses for data storage via femtosecond laser writing. Optica 13 (2026), DOI 10.1364/OPTICA.592661.",
      "url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/optica-13-4-698.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    }
  ],
  "updated": "2026-10-18",
  "provenance": [
    "This definition concerns volumetric optical recording, not the spatial samples of a rendered 3D image."
  ]
}