“The Super-Resolution Disc” Technology co-developed by research teams led by Professor Ruan Hao of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and Academician Gu Min of the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology—users of the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai (NFPSS)—has been honored with three prestigious awards: "2024 China's Top 10 Science and Technology Advances", "2024 China's Top 10 Optical Breakthroughs (Applied Research Category)", and "2024 China's Top 10 Societally Impactful Optical Events". This represents a critical breakthrough in core information storage technologies, with research findings published in Nature under the title:"A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity".

The team pioneered the world's first dual-beam controlled super-resolution optical storage technology using aggregation-induced emission (AIE) dye-doped organic resin films. This innovation achieves petabit-scale storage by breaking the optical diffraction limit through dual-beam writing and reading,demonstrating storage capabilities with:

Record point size: 54 nm

Recording layers: 100 layers

Material longevity: >40 years

The single-disc capacity equals 8,000 commercial optical discs or ~100 standard HDDs**. This technology is strategically vital for overcoming China's information storage bottlenecks and advancing sustainable digital economies,marking a full-chain breakthrough from technological R&D to societal value realization.

Figure 1: Schematic of Pb-scale disc fabrication and read/write mechanisms

Figure 2: Physical disc prototype

The Integrated Laser Microscopy System at NFPSS utilized its super-resolution microscope (Leica TCS SP8 STED 3X) to characterize fluorescence contrast and readout durability of super-resolution recording points.