Photon Tapped for High-Capacity Storage
(14 votes, average: 4.21 out of 5)
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by Mike Zazaian January 20, 2007 - 3:44pm, 10 Comments
Led by Associate Professor of Physics John Howell the team projected light through a stencil into a 4-inch cube of cesium gas. Upon entering the cube, the image was slowed and compressed, allowing over 100 compressed and slowed images to be stored within the same cell.
It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we’re storing an entire image,
said Howell. 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.
Optical buffering, the process of storing data within photons, has been a hot topic within the computer industry because of the speed boosts it promises in regard to both processing and networking. While other researchers have successfully store data in photons, matters of signal distortion and refraction have made it impossible to retrieve data in the same state at which it was stored. Howell’s new method, however, preserves all of the original properties of photon pulses, and allows that data to be manipulated within the 100 nanosecond time frame in which the proton is kept in stasis.
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,
said 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 signal—it’s a wonderful achievement.
While Howell’s research has certainly set a precedent in optical buffering, the storage of the UR
seen above is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Howell’s team is now working toward the goal of delaying pulses for several milliseconds, which would allow even broader uses of buffered data.
Perhaps more ambitious is their intent to store as many as 10,000 pulses of information, essentially an entire archive of such photos as seen above, within a proton for a single nanosecond. Added Howell:
Now I want to see if we can delay something almost permanently, even at the single photon level. If we can do that, we’re looking at storing incredible amounts of information in just a few photons.
Press release courtesy of the University of Rochester
Great article; the promise of optical buffering is amazingly filled with potential. Also great to see articles coming back up on techfreep!!
joseph
I’m assuming that throughout the article you meant “photon” not “proton”.
RD
“stored within the same cell”… i.e., the data is stored in the cell, not “within” the photon? So, how do you put a cesium gas cell on a chip?
Alaalas
i read the actual press release and nowhere does it say anything about storing information in a “single photon.”
what a shitty article.
tony
Mmmmm, I want a quantum computer! oh wait, maybe I already have something similar in my skull, Yay! Great stuff!
Bryan
Indeed tony, this summary is way off. The UR press release is talking about the team using a scanning beam of photons, each of which gets delayed momentarily in the cesium gas. As those photons come out the other end, they are collected by a CCD imager. The idea is that you can slow a photon or group thereof in the cesium gas without destroying or modifying it. To store an entire image, you’d have to send a whole lot of photons, as though taking an exposure for a camera.
The real benefit of this technology involves storing photons within fiber optic circuits or perhaps even as long-term image storage. Photons can contain different quanta of energy, and thus you could store a number of different values in sequential order using a series of photons. The key is the ability to slow these photons so that you can store them for a meaningful (ie, more than nanosecond-order) amount of time.
Alec