Light has always carried more than brightness. In this case, it also carries direction and twist. That mix may open a new path for storing far more data in the same physical space. A research team led by Xiaodi Tan at Fujian Normal University in China has developed a holographic data storage method that packs information into three properties of light at once: amplitude, phase and polarization. This was reported in Optica. The approach pushes beyond the usual one- or two-dimensional encoding used in most holographic storage research. Therefore, it could help address the growing demand for denser, faster storage systems. Holographic data storage already differs from a hard drive or optical disc in a basic way. Instead of writing data only on a surface, it stores image-like data pages throughout the volume of a material using laser light. In fact, those light patterns can overlap inside the material. Therefore, the technique promises high storage density and fast data transfer. “In conventional holographic data storage, data encoding typically uses one light dimension such as amplitude …