It's a good physical effect that doesn't obviously solve any real problems. Consider: 5D optical storage is thirty years old and SOTA transfer speed is about as many megabits per second. By the time it's fast enough to even approach a speed that's commercially useful, all of the other tech we have will have continued to progress. That's not to mention how fragile the quartz disks are. It's a real physical effect that doesn't solve problems.
We already have zero retention energy storage. The phenomenon in this paper isn't even all that new by the author's own admission—that's how it got to the fifty third revision. The tier 2 setup described here is purely speculative. Producing a single square centimeter of pure "fluorographane" (sic?) is still a task that would be exceedingly challenging for a research lab. And it's not clear how much energy it would take to read and write the data, or support the hardware necessary to do it at a speed that's makes it uniquely useful. Even if all of these problems are solved, and the cost is made reasonable, it's still completely unclear if it would be substantially better than what we have today.
> all of the other tech we have will have continued to progress
These other techs also came from somewhere, often brewing slowly for decades until the conditions align for a commercial success. This one may be, or may not be, one of these slow-brewing techs of the future, suddenly displacing the SOTA of the (future) day.
Hell, the steam turbine was in principle invented in like 300 AD, and first commercialized (or, rather, militarized) by the end of 19th century. Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter, the submarine, and the tank, in principle; it took about 500 years for them to become large commercial and military successes.
We already have zero retention energy storage. The phenomenon in this paper isn't even all that new by the author's own admission—that's how it got to the fifty third revision. The tier 2 setup described here is purely speculative. Producing a single square centimeter of pure "fluorographane" (sic?) is still a task that would be exceedingly challenging for a research lab. And it's not clear how much energy it would take to read and write the data, or support the hardware necessary to do it at a speed that's makes it uniquely useful. Even if all of these problems are solved, and the cost is made reasonable, it's still completely unclear if it would be substantially better than what we have today.