On a visit to Japan in 1999, researcher Peter Kazansky encountered a mysterious physical phenomenon that he now believes holds the answer to the future of data storage.
In Kyoto University’s optoelectronics lab, scientists were experimenting with writing on glass using ultrafast, femtosecond lasers which emit a light pulse every quadrillionth of a second.
But they noticed something unusual about how light was travelling through the glass that had been lasered. Rayleigh scattering is a well-established effect which describes how white light bounces off small particles in all directions (explaining, among other things, why the sky appears blue). But in this case, the light wasn’t bouncing as expected.
