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I initially interpreted "5D" in the title as five spatial dimensions, which would be incredible, but the reality is entirely credible:

> The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

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I wonder how orientation is just a single degree of freedom though; somehow one of the polarization directions of the light must get lost along the way.

Perhaps it is because this is a crystal and there is a relationship or redundancy between the different axes of orientation.

EDIT: Actually, this [1] paper says in the abstract that they use wavelength, polarization and the three spatial dimensions. So it is wavelength and not direction!

[1]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7245/full/nature0...

Quasicrystals were the first thing I thought of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

> Quasicrystals were the first thing I thought of...

I searched your link, I did not find quasicrystals suggesting anything related to memory storage. Why quasicrystals?

It's just a conceptual link. Think about the higher dimensional symmetries in quasicrystals and how one might encode information using a mechanism that exploits that property.

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