All that triggers interest in me to know more!

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9008999

January 24, 2007 (TechWorld.com) -- Scientists are claiming a breakthrough in the ability to attach an image to a photon of light and retrieve it later.

Scientists at the University of Rochester in New York used their college logo, consisting of a few hundred pixels, for the experiment and were able to attach the image to a single photon of light. The photon or pulse of light was slowed down 100 nanoseconds and compressed to 1% of its original length. The scientists claim that the technology could one day store tremendous amounts of information very densely.

Researcher John Howell, assistant professor of physics at the university, is now working on delaying dozens of pulses for as long as several milliseconds, and as many as 10,000 pulses for up to a nanosecond in a 4-in. cell of cesium gas at a warm 100 degrees Celsius.

Previous optical buffering trials have found that most information carried by the light is lost. This latest achievement is important because engineers are trying to speed up computer processing and network speeds using light. Their systems slow down when they have to convert light to electronic signals to store information, even for a short while.

"It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we're storing an entire image. It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera -- this is like a 6-megapixel camera," Howell said.

The device was revealed in today's online issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

"Now I want to see if we can delay something almost permanently, even at the single photon level," Howell said. "If we can do that, we're looking at storing incredible amounts of information in just a few photons."

Labels: data storage, photon