There is a common home-remedy for scratched flat-screen monitors that says to rub a bit of petroleum jelly into the scratch. The rationale being that because the jelly has a similar refractive index as the plastic of the screen, light does not refract when moving from the jelly to the plastic and back as it does when moving from air to the plastic and back.
This makes sense, and some people have reported successful results, but naturally it depends on the specific jelly and specific monitor. Others have reported less success which also makes sense because there is a wide variety of jellies and monitors.
In this vein, I am wondering about optical discs. Scratches are a common blight on CDs and DVDs that most people have had to deal with at some point. It stands to reason that a similar technique could be used with optical discs (at least once, to recover the data). Even better, there is not as much variety with discs; they all use standard polycarbonate with little variation in their chemical composition, so the same material should work for pretty much all discs.
Does anyone know of a material which has a refractive index as close as possible to that of polycarbonate (1.584-1.586)?
There’s two things to note:
The disc spins very fast in the drive, so it can’t be something too soft because then the particles could get spun out and splattered inside the drive.
CD/DVD repair-kits often include some sort of chemical solution, but a home-remedy should be a substance that most people can easily and cheaply get a hold of.
