Nano-data storage and lithography by near-field optics

With the development of information, the density and capacity of information storage devices are required to be higher, and the smallest information bit size will be reduced to below the 100 nm accordingly. For the optical data storage and random access memory, the smallest bit size is mainly determined by the optical diffraction limit, which leads to some difficulties to get nanometric information bit by traditional far-field optics method. In order to realize the nano-data storage, one must break the optical diffraction barrier. In this report, we look back the develop story of optical storage, and give novel near-field optics methods for realizing the nano-data storage and nanolithography.