Optical storage techniques are among the oldest and most commonly employed to store large volumes of data for archival and data transport purposes, and are dependent on advances in materials to maintain steady improvements in storage density. Further, such applications can leverage write-once-read-many storage technologies to guarantee transactional consistency and security against data tampering, an increasingly important aspect of data management, for mass storage transactional memory. However, the density of optical media is constrained by the diffraction limit that imposes a classical spatial resolution of approximately λ /2, where λ is the wavelength of light used to interrogate the media. [ 1 ] Thus, optical storage density can only be linearly improved, in the classical limit, by reducing the wavelength of light, and is more practically limited by the availability of laser sources and refl ective, or photoactive, media in that band. Many techniques have been investigated to overcome this problem, [2][3][4][5][6][7][8] among which increasing the bit density of each storage cell, or pit, is particularly promising for its potential to increase total storage density, even at low cell densities, by introducing a new recording dimension. In this regard, DNA oligomers have been studied extensively to achieve high storage density. [ 9 ] Building on the potential for DNA to achieve vast enhancements in storage density, we demonstrate a novel retrieval technique which we call polychromatic address multiplexing (PAM) to access multiple bits stored in the same cell. By exploiting nanoscale fl uorescence-based storage elements, PAM enables storage of hundreds of bits in a single cell. In this fashion, higher storage densities beyond the diffraction limit are achieved with this technique, which can also be incorporated into conventional optical-storage technologies.A conceptual schematic of a PAM disc is illustrated in Figure 1 a. A PAM disc can have several physical layers of storage. Each physical layer consists of many spatially resolved cells each of which contains a large number of storage elements. Each cell stores several logical words, that is, a collection of bits associated with a single address. A word address is a unique combination of incident excitation colors (wavelengths), for example, generated by an integrated LED or laser array, which activates the subset of storage elements in the cell that collectively store the word value corresponding to that address. Consequently, the activated storage elements cause a fl uorescence increase which is eventually translated to the binary value of the addressed word.The storage element in PAM, which we call a PEPE (photoerasable PAM element), operates based on Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) and is composed of a set of fl uorophores placed on a grid-like DNA nanostructure. The simplest form of a PEPE, which is called an ER-PEPE, (illustrated in Figure 1 b) is a UV-disruptable FRET-pair in which the donor and acceptor molecules (E and R) act as the excitatio...