Australian researchers have discovered a way to use ceramics as digital storage.

The answer was just like many answers in science – hit it with a laser.

By ‘shining’ a beam of electrons onto special ceramics, the team at the University of Sydney say they were able to create new hard-drive-making materials with incredible memory capacities.

“Finding a way to increase memory capability without increasing the hard drive size is a major challenge in this area,” says lead author Zibin Chen, a PhD candidate at the University’s Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies.

The project focused on new materials for memory storage, testing a special kind of oxide ceramic with ferroelectric properties.

These materials have tiny areas inside that can contain an electric dipole, which is switchable.

Two opposite dipole directions can be used as the two logic signals ‘0’ and ‘1’, so that they can serve as memory bits.

“The key challenge is how to ‘set’ the domains to one condition or the other, and how to ‘switch’ the domains once written. Conventional techniques use local heating, mechanical stress or electrical bias—all of which have major drawbacks,” Zibin said.

“We have discovered that a high-energy electron beam with an omni-directional electric field does the job.

“We are proposing an approach that could reduce the current domain size by 100 times, resulting in a 100 times greater data storage capability.”

Using lasers and ceramics could make future drives more stable too.

The most notorious cause of failure for computer hard drives is a head crash, where the ‘head’ of the device that hovers just above the rotating disk touches or scratches the data-storage surface, usually resulting in severe data loss.

The approach being developed at the University of Sydney requires no physical contact with the data storage media, and so it can avoid physical damage to the devices.

“As materials engineers, we think a lot about how to stimulate local changes in the atomic-scale structure of materials so as to access remarkable new properties and behaviour,” said co-researcher Professor Simon Ringer.

“We are really excited to have discovered that applying these local electric fields with nanoscale precision can create a new paradigm for computer memory.”