Wow. Great stuff; great find, Sparaig. Thanks. **
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If this becomes reality, whoa.... > > http://physorg.com/news88439430.html > > > Ultra-Dense Optical Storage -- on One Photon > > > First image stored and retrieved from a single photon (Credit University of Rochester) > Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows > them to encode an entire image's worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for > storage, and then retrieve the image intact. > > While the initial test image consists of only a few hundred pixels, a tremendous amount of > information can be stored with the new technique. > > The image, a "UR" for the University of Rochester, was made using a single pulse of light > and the team can fit as many as a hundred of these pulses at once into a tiny, four-inch > cell. Squeezing that much information into so small a space and retrieving it intact opens > the door to optical bufferingstoring information as light. > > "It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we're storing an > entire image," says John Howell, associate professor of physics and leader of the team that > created the device, which is revealed in today's online issue of the journal Physical Review > Letters. "It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel > and doing it with a camerathis is like a 6-megapixel camera." > > > > Diagram of the encoding device. Credit: University of Rochester > > > "You can have a tremendous amount of information in a pulse of light, but normally if you > try to buffer it, you can lose much of that information," says Ryan Camacho, Howell's > graduate student and lead author on the article. "We're showing it's possible to pull out an > enormous amount of information with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio even with > very low light levels." > > Optical buffering is a particularly hot field right now because engineers are trying to speed > up computer processing and network speeds using light, but their systems bog down > when they have to convert light signals to electronic signals to store information, even for > a short while. > > Howell's group used a completely new approach that preserves all the properties of the > pulse. The buffered pulse is essentially a perfect original; there is almost no distortion, no > additional diffraction, and the phase and amplitude of the original signal are all preserved. > Howell is even working to demonstrate that quantum entanglement remains unscathed. > > To produce the UR image, Howell simply shone a beam of light through a stencil with the > U and R etched out. Anyone who has made shadow puppets knows how this works, but > Howell turned down the light so much that a single photon was all that passed through the > stencil. > > Quantum mechanics dictates some strange things at that scale, so that bit of light could > be thought of as both a particle and a wave. As a wave, it passed through all parts of the > stencil at once, carrying the "shadow" of the UR with it. The pulse of light then entered a > four-inch cell of cesium gas at a warm 100 degrees Celsius, where it was slowed and > compressed, allowing many pulses to fit inside the small tube at the same time. > > "The parallel amount of information John has sent all at once in an image is enormous in > comparison to what anyone else has done before," says Alan Willner, professor of electrical > engineering at the University of Southern California and president of the IEEE Lasers and > Optical Society. "To do that and be able to maintain the integrity of the signalit's a > wonderful achievement." > > Howell has so far been able to delay light pulses 100 nanoseconds and compress them to > 1 percent of their original length. He is now working toward delaying dozens of pulses for > as long as several milliseconds, and as many as 10,000 pulses for up to a nanosecond. > > "Now I want to see if we can delay something almost permanently, even at the single > photon level," says Howell. "If we can do that, we're looking at storing incredible amounts > of information in just a few photons." > > Source: University of Rochester >
