During the IT Press Tour in Boston in June 2026, Wave Domain introduced its Standing Wave Storage (SWS) platform, based on principles of interferential photography, as a potential solution for long-term digital data archiving.
Wave Domain, a New Jersey-based company, emerged from stealth mode at the 68th IT Press Tour in Boston to present Standing Wave Storage (SWS), a write-once, read-forever archival technology rooted in 19th-century physics. Co-inventor Clark Johnson, a 95-year-old physicist with extensive experience in magnetic recording and government technology advisory roles, joined spokesperson Bob Miller in detailing the platform’s development and capabilities.
Wave Domain’s technology repurposes Gabriel Lippmann’s 1891 Nobel Prize-winning interferential color photography process, which captures standing-wave interference patterns in silver-halide emulsion. Unlike conventional binary storage, SWS enables multi-state encoding by superimposing multiple colored wavelengths at each storage location. The company has demonstrated four superimposed wavelengths per location, selected from a palette of up to 23 or 32 monochromatic sources, yielding thousands of distinct states per pixel—approximately 13 bits per location with current implementations.
The write process employs off-the-shelf components, including monochromatic LEDs, a fiber-optic bundle, and an LCD shutter matrix controlled by firmware to expose specific wavelengths on the media. After chemical development, reading involves flashing the same wavelengths and detecting absorbed light with a matched CCD array, functioning as a Rugate filter. Exposure times have been reduced to under half a second, with pixel sizes down to two microns and parallel plate reading in under one second. Forward error correction is integrated due to the write-once nature of the media.
Validation includes survival on NASA’s HELIOS mission aboard the International Space Station, where plates endured eight months of microgravity and radiation with no degradation in stored patterns. MITRE conducted systematic tests confirming multi-wavelength superposition, exposure speed, and color recovery. DARPA, NASA, and other agencies have provided funding totaling several million dollars.
The business model focuses on licensing intellectual property, with seven U.S. patents issued. Two optics specialists are competing to develop the SS1 prototype, featuring four-color encoding on slide-sized plates (approximately 4-5 inches). CEO Eric Rosenthal, formerly VP of R&D at Disney Imagineering, and CTO Pedro lead partner negotiations. The company estimates $5 million in additional funding could support an early commercial system within three years.
Challenges include transitioning from laboratory demonstrations to deployable products amid a difficult funding environment. Conversations with U.S. national labs have slowed, prompting consideration of international partners in Europe and Australia. One original inventor, Richard Solomon, passed away last year, adding urgency given the advanced ages of the remaining founders.
SWS emphasizes permanence—no power, migration, or environmental controls required post-writing—and potential reductions in media, energy use, and carbon footprint compared to existing archival solutions. Form factors remain flexible, potentially incorporating human-readable metadata alongside data on the same substrate. While areal density questions persist, the company highlights multi-state capacity and long-term cost per bit as key metrics for archival storage.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de