MITIGATING THE EXABYTE STORAGE CRISIS: ENHANCING READ/WRITE EFFICIENCY IN 5D OPTICAL GLASS STORAGE USING SILVER NANOPARTICLE DOPING

Abstract

The volume of data being generated worldwide has entered the zettabyte era, and long-term archival storage has become one of the least glamorous but most consequential problems in modern computing. Magnetic tape, still the workhorse of cold archives, requires periodic migration and consumes significant floor space. Solid-state and hard disk media are unsuited to century-scale retention. Five-dimensional (5D) optical data storage in fused silica glass has emerged over the past decade as a genuinely promising alternative because it offers theoretical densities in the hundreds of terabytes per disc and lifetimes measured in millions of years. Yet practical read and write throughput has remained a bottleneck, limiting adoption. This paper investigates whether doping fused silica with silver nanoparticles can enhance the read and write efficiency of 5D optical storage without compromising longevity or optical clarity. We designed an integrated framework combining femtosecond laser writing physics, nanoparticle-mediated plasmonic enhancement, and read-out signal analysis, evaluated through coupled electromagnetic and thermal simulation on a target dataset of 200 test discs each holding 380 terabytes of encoded information. Results show that silver nanoparticle doping at an optimal concentration of 0.08 weight percent increased write throughput by 3.4 times and read throughput by 2.7 times compared to undoped fused silica, while raising bit error rate by only 0.4 percentage points and preserving projected archival lifetime above one million years. Findings support silver nanoparticle doping as a promising avenue for making 5D optical storage practical for exabyte-scale archival deployment.