optical-storage-voxel · research · also laser-written storage voxel

Optical storage voxel

An optical storage voxel is a localized modification inside a transparent medium whose measurable optical properties encode a data symbol.

Related Observatory article: Optical storage voxel on hesela.com

A voxel is a physical recording element, not necessarily one bit; distinguish its symbol alphabet from user capacity after coding and engineering overhead [1].

Glass-storage designs use different optical responses, so voxel, phase voxel and birefringent voxel are not interchangeable descriptions of the same readout mechanism [2].

Writer 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 [4].

Relations

related

glass-storage, error-correcting-code, holographic-storage

Citations

1. Anderson et al. Project Silica: Towards Sustainable Cloud Archival Storage in Glass. SOSP 2023, sections 3-7. (accessed 2026-10-18)
2. Microsoft Research Project Silica Team. Laser writing in glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage. Nature 650 (2026). (accessed 2026-10-18)
4. Lawson et al. Property-driven analysis of glasses for data storage via femtosecond laser writing. Optica 13 (2026), DOI 10.1364/OPTICA.592661. (accessed 2026-10-18)

Further reading

3. Hesela: Glass Data Storage, mechanisms and research evidence. (accessed 2026-10-18)

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