Scottish boffins believe that they hold the key to growing supercomputers out of crystals. They believe that the technology could end up creating computers with massive storage capacity.

Boffins at the University of Edinburgh used low-powered lasers to make salt crystals in gel. The crystals could be used as storage devices for desktop computers capable of holding a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube.

They admit that it will take a while before these crystals can be used in practical applications such as optical storage, but Dr Andy Alexander said that the technology was getting there. Compared with the flat two-dimensional surface of a CD, three-dimensional optical data storage uses many more layers, in which tiny crystals could act as storage points.