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Data Storage Science

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage on One Photon 139

Posted by CowboyNeal from the smart-particles dept.
Andreaskem submitted this story about researchers being able to encode an image into a photon and to later retrieve it intact. From the article: "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... 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... 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."
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Ultra-Dense Optical Storage on One Photon More

Ultra-Dense Optical Storage on One Photon

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  • To Clarify (Score:5, Informative)

    by logicnazi ( 169418 ) <gerdes@inv[ ]ant.org ['ari' in gap]> on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:21AM (#17694976) Homepage
    The Image is NOT encoded into one photon, at least not in a way that can be extracted again. Each individual photon is in a superposition of having gone all the possible paths and the set of those possible paths is the information to be extracted but when measured each photon will only reveal a small amount of information so it is only in the aggregate (by measuring lots of photons) that the initial image can be reproduced. At least this is what the article sounds like it is saying it wasn't very clear.

    In fact it is probably best to think of this without quantum mechanics at all. What they did is pretty much like figuring out the shape of an object by shooting BBs at it and looking at which ones make it past the object.

    The part that is supposedly new and interesting is the way they collected the photons at the other end. It didn't seem very clear on this but apparently by catching many of the photons in their device at one time it made it much easier to decode the image in the light.

    • Re:To Clarify (Score:4, Informative)

      by drerwk ( 695572 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:30AM (#17695040) Homepage
      Parent is right - article is not particlely clear.
      By itself a photon can be described as having, location, and energy. Thanks to Heisenberg you can only know so much about location and energy at the same time. I don't recall what property fails to commute with spin, maybe time? But the total information in a single photon is at best 3 reals for location, a real for energy, and an imaginary for spin.

      • Re:To Clarify (Score:5, Funny)

        by Teresita ( 982888 ) <badinage1@NospaM.netzero dot net> on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:35AM (#17695086) Homepage
        "Thanks to Heisenberg you can only know so much about location and energy at the same time."

        Dern that Heisenberg. And you can also thank Einstein for the fact that it takes at least one year to travel one light-year.

        • Actually, you can travel a light year in significantly less than a year, depending on how one defines "light year" and "year". For example, if you accelerated at 1 g towards Alpha Centauri (fun fact: 1 g is just over 1 ly/yr^2!), you would reach Alpha Centauri in about 2.25 years. Of course, looking back the original distance of 4 light years would now be shortened (thanks to that fella Lorentz [fourmilab.ch]). Bonus fact: as you pass Alpha Centauri, you will be covering 5 light years (as measured in the Earth frame of re

          • "Bonus fact: as you pass Alpha Centauri, you will be covering 5 light years (as measured in the Earth frame of reference) per year (as measured in your own frame of reference)!" Extra bonus fact, travel at sqrt(1/2)*c, you have the local illusion of traveling one light-year per year.
          • 1 g = approx. 9.8 m/s

            1 light year = 299798452*3600*24*365.25 = 9460919628835200 m

            1 light year / year^2 = answer/(3600*24*365.25)^2 = 9.5000396734859431642456967576749 m/s

            Interesting :)

            I do have one question though - at 1 g accelaration, it would take :

            299792458/9.8 = 30591067.142857142857142857142857 seconds = 354.0632771164021164021164021164 days

            So, in less than a year, you would hit the speed of light. How would you be able to accelarate past it?
            • Got my units for accelaration wrong. should be m/(s^2). ;)

            • As you approach the speed of light, an equal amount of force (the "g" that you're feeling) results in diminishing acceleration. The figures I gave were for a constant force rather than for a constant acceleration (from the Earth frame of reference).

              An alternative way to view it is that at any given point, you are accelerating away from the frame of reference that is traveling at the same speed as you (but that is not accelerating), at 9.8 m/s^2. Of course, this reference frame is, by definition, at rest,

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Macka ( 9388 )

            I thought that the closer you get to the speed of light, that time for the traveler slows down. So would that be 2.25 years experienced by the traveler, or time observed by someone back on earth (assuming some mechanism where by they could observe)?

            • About 5 years will have passed on Earth. This would not be merely academic, either. If you started to decelerate at the half-way point, it would take you almost 3.6 years to make the trip (both the acceleration and deceleration require general relativity and not just special relativity), and more than 5.9 years will have passed on Earth. If you then returned back to Earth, using the same strategy, you would be 4.7 years younger than your twin that you left behind.

              A more interesting thought is of visiting

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Macka ( 9388 )

                Thanks. That's fascinating.

                So it's not inconceivable that the first traveler to Betelgeuse could arrive 12.2 years later only to find the place already settled and populated by 2nd generation people who discovered how to do interstellar travel by wormhole some 150 years earlier (their time). There has to be an idea for a film in that somewhere .. hehe :)

        • And you can also thank Einstein for the fact that it takes at least one year to travel one light-year.

          I'm a tachyon, you insensitive clod!!!

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 )
        >don't recall what property fails to commute with spin, maybe time?

        Spin in the non-measured axes.

        Time pairs up with energy: if you look at a really fine time scale, energy is so uncertain that there's a sea of particles (m == E / c**2).

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by drerwk ( 695572 )
          >Spin in the non-measured axes. That makes perfect sensne. I didn't like time, but my brain was a little slow as I posted. I even forgot the propagation vector. I think should be 3 reals for location, 3 reals for propagation vector, and a +- spin state.

      • Re:To Clarify (Score:5, Funny)

        by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @12:50PM (#17695616)
        Heisenberg might have been here.
      • "Parent is right - article is not particlely clear"

        Freud was apparently very right also :)

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by drerwk ( 695572 )
          My spelling is nothing to brag about - but that was in fact intentional. I'm glad someone actually noticed.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by sveinb ( 305718 )
        Now, this is the funny thing about quantum mechanics. Yes, when you _measure_ the properties of a photon, it has properties like energy, momentum and spin - a handful of real-valued numbers. But if you were to do a correct computer simulation of how a photon behaves on its trajectory from emission to absorbtion, you would need to attribute to it a complex number for _every point in the universe_. A significant amount of information. One single photon on its own behaves very much like the whole classical E/M
      • "By itself a photon can be described as having, location, and energy."
        Actually at least in non relativistic quantum, a free particle can be described as a wave function over space, the chances(densities) of having different energies can be determined from that. It could also be described with a wavefunction over impulse. I am sure other descriptions than that are also possible. (many bound particle solutions can be "described" by a integer)
        I dont know how this works in relativistic quantum, but, since Heise

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by drerwk ( 695572 )
          I remember something along those lines. Are you suggesting that there is more information than 6 reals and a spin? Have a look at http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=112 1 61 [physicsforums.com] which talks about the wave function of the photon, but I suggest that at least in the experiment originally described in this article we are not free to consider the photon over all space. We know that the photon passed through the mask and that places serious limits on what the wave function can look like.
      • The classical way to quantify information is in bits, no? It seems like a real can hold a helluva lot of information, so what's the real-to-bit conversion? I assume it's somehow accounted for by an expanded definition involving qubits.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mastershake_phd ( 1050150 )
      In fact it is probably best to think of this without quantum mechanics at all. What they did is pretty much like figuring out the shape of an object by shooting BBs at it and looking at which ones make it past the object.

      You mean like a X-Ray.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Andreaskem ( 999089 )
      "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."

      The article as a whole might not be very clear, but this line says that only a single photon passed through.

      • Re:To Clarify (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Myrv ( 305480 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:58AM (#17695284)
        They simply say one photon passes through the mask at a time. They didn't say the entire image was reconstructed using that single photon.

        This sounds very similar to the double slit experiment were you send single photons through a double slit and record where they land on a screen placed behind the slits. Each photon will only light up one spot on the screen but if you collect enough samples you see a pattern start to emerge that looks like the interference pattern you would expect if light passed through both slits simultaneously. Basically, each photon which passes through the slits interfers with itself to to form the interference pattern.

        In the article they are simply firing the photon through a mask with a pattern in it instead of a double slit. The photon acts as if it passed through all parts of the mask at the same time. But to reconstruct the image they would have to sample many photons passing through mask.

        From what I can gather the important part of the article is that they have been able to slow down each photon in order to buffer it. So you can send 100 photons through the mask (one after another) then buffer those photons for 100 ns and then pass them on to a detector that reassembles the image from the 100 or so photons. I'm also guessing they can't slow down multiple photons at a time (at least not reliably) so the ability to serialize the photons is important as well.

        • Re:To Clarify (Score:5, Informative)

          by CharlesEGrant ( 465919 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @12:28PM (#17695488)
          rom what I can gather the important part of the article is that they have been able to slow down each photon in order to buffer it.
          The original press release is very poorly writen. A better article is in the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com]. Also, the title of the actual peer-reviewed article is on Howell's publication page [rochester.edu] as "All-optical delay of images using slow light" Ryan M. Camacho, Curtis Broadbent, Irfan Ali Khan and John C. Howell, Phys. Rev. Lett (in press). As you say, the centeral acheivement is in their ability to slow down the photons. Unfortunately the actual paper doesn't yet seem to be available as the Phys Rev Letter website. I think the business of encoding an image on a single photon is a confabulation by the author of the press release.

          • I think the business of encoding an image on a single photon is a confabulation by the author of the press release.

            Yeah. This is just the two-slit experiment with a material with a slow propagation velocity in the optical path. It's not new physics.

        • Slightly offtopic (ready for mod-down) but one thing I've never understood about the double-slit experiment is the result you get when only one photon is sent at a time, i.e. that the interference pattern still appears. Apparently this is a good example of a) wave-particle duality (which I understand) and b) quantum determinancy (which I don't). If someone can clarify this experiment to me it would be appreciated.

          Disclaimer: My exposure to quantum physics is "A Brief History Of Time", Wikipedia and teh

          • Slightly offtopic (ready for mod-down) but one thing I've never understood about the double-slit experiment is the result you get when only one photon is sent at a time, i.e. that the interference pattern still appears. Apparently this is a good example of a) wave-particle duality (which I understand) and b) quantum determinancy (which I don't). If someone can clarify this experiment to me it would be appreciated.

            Disclaimer: My exposure to quantum physics is "A Brief History Of Time", Wikipedia and teh intarweb.

            Disclaimer: Mine too. I think your question is entirely on topic, though.

            No, I think the wave-particle duality is specifically the same weirdness as this particular result. The single photon still behaves like a wave (as in the dual slit experiment). The surprise was that you can actually encode and preserve information about the slit in that waveform. Multiple photons went through (not much of an experiment if they only tested it on one photon), but the article also states that it is the behavior

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
            As I understand it the wave's amplitude (I think you need to use complex waves so the amplitude remains constant in the absense of interference) is the photon's probability of being in that location. Once the photon interacts with something that's larger than a quantum its position is randomly decided upon. I suppose this saves processor time for the universe since it only has to calculate one wave pattern per photon source and remember how many photons this pattern currently contains.
        • If it is possible to teleport a proton, and it's possible also to store information in a proton, it is possible to communicate information faster than light.

          This means it's possible for us to create quantum computers which transfer information instantly, I'm not even sure we know what this means yet but discovering this is like discovering atomic technology in the 1930s.

          If protons can be teleported due to non locality of the quantum, it changes everything. What we really have to consider is the fact that nu

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Sounds like the quantum bomb [wikipedia.org] problem - detecting something by using less than a single photon.
      • Yes, this was why I said it was written very confusingly.

        Only one photon passed through at a time but the image was then reconstructed from MANY such photons. The advance that was made was a way to slow down/store all these photons sent individually in a way that made it easier to extract the image from them.
    • I just want to add: you can only shoot one bb at the photon; doing so destroys it. So you have to decide which particular bit of information you want to retrieve, and retrieving that bit renders the rest permanently irretrievable.


      Quantum computing is very fun and mind-bending, and would facilitate lots of computation that we currently think of as "impossible." Being able to do encodings such as those (mis)described in the article would be one consequence.

    • Thanks for trying to clarify - but I'm none the wiser.

      I suspect that I am representative of the majority of /.ers in that I have some understanding of quantum mechanics/chronodynamics etc, but I tend to think in terms of data density s2n ratios etc.

      I have many questions, but the one I would *really* like an answer to in terms I can understand is:

      The article and TFA say that the info is encoded in one photon. How?

      AFAIK a photon can only carry so much information - viz, energy level/frequency/duration etc. A
      • Remember that Einstein was offended by quantum mechanics.

        If this is working like the two-slit experiment, then each photon carries more information than you can read out from it. In the two-slit experiment, a photon or an electron makes only one spot on the detector screen but even if you feed them through one at a time the pattern that builds up at the detector is what you'd see if it went through both slits at once.

        Each photon that goes by the Death Star carries a complete picture of it but can only gasp

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )
        As I dimly understand it, the single photon acts like a wave, going through the entire mask at once and interfering with itself. It "contains" this information until you measure it's position on the target. Then you lose almost all the "information" of the wave, and it collapses to a single point on the target. You have to send multiple photons through the mask (not necessarily at the same time) in order to build up the information that the interference pattern contains about the mask.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by herovit ( 455234 )
      It is true that once you measure that photon, you only extract the one bit of information, but if you were to send this photon into a quantum computer, you could do all sorts of analysis on it first. So in some sense the information is there, it's just not extractable.

      Also, see the 1966 short story by Bob Shaw that anticipated this:
      Slow Light [scifi.com]
      • "So in some sense the information is there, it's just not extractable."

        In the Akashic Library there are a enormous number of books written by monkeys, each one containing 100 pages, each page containing one kilobyte of random ASCII text, and no two books are alike. The biography of you from cradle to grave is in there, but so are millions of lying biographies which get any number of details about your life totally wrong. In some sense the information is there, it's just not extractable.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
        I don't think the quantum computer can deal with this unless you can build a quantum analog-digital converter.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      What they did is pretty much like figuring out the shape of an object by shooting BBs at it and looking at which ones make it past the object.

      Looks just like my little brother.

      KFG
      • posting to undo an errant "overrated" mod when I meant to hit "funny". Stupid java mod system.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 )
      figuring out the shape of an object by shooting BBs at it and looking at which ones make it past the object.

            Most people agree that this is generally called a "shadow"...
    • This means, we can in theory now communicate faster than light.

      Quantum Communications PDF [google.com]

      Quantum Nuclear Teleportation [google.com]

      This is actually bigger news than it seems. It could influence information technology, and have the potential to create strange new weapons. Let's hope we have enough sense to use it for communications and computing.

  • Photo Storage (Score:3, Funny)

    by Freestyling ( 997523 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:25AM (#17695012)
    Does this mean I can now store my photos in a nice easy to carry cartridge or caesium gas? This is a great improvment on these clunky microSD cards I use now.

  • Incorrect summary (Score:4, Informative)

    by forand ( 530402 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:27AM (#17695020) Homepage
    Both the poster's summary and the news release are incorrect. You cannot encode more information than quantum numbers on any quanta, it is not possible. I believe that another poster has a plausible explanation for what is actually going on: that they measure many photons and reconstruct the information by knowing the possible paths which do the encoding of information.

    • A photon carries a lot of information (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Any photon has a frequency (wavelength, energy, whatever). The frequency is not quantified and can assume infinite values. By generating a photon with the correct energy, I have encoded, in theory at least, a vast amount of information. Of course your ability to encode and decode very much information is limited by the available technology and the noise environment. :-)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by drerwk ( 695572 )
        >By generating a photon with the correct energy, I have encoded, in theory at least, a vast amount of information.
        Not really, a particular energy is just a single number. It may have a vast range, but it it only a single real number. I suppose we could play the game where if I am able to encode specify the number to arbitrary precision, we can equate that to an arbitrary number of bits. But even though I am a little weak in math, I think that 2 real numbers contain more information than a single real nu

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by unchiujar ( 1030510 )
          Not so, :) A single number can store a huge amount of information. Your hardrive is one single very long binary number. If you define a way of retrieving information you can store images as numbers (binary, hex, octal,decimal or otherwise).
          • I think the GP acknowledged that case. The problem in encoding information in a single natural entity is precision. It's the old "significant figures" issue from Chemistry 101.
        • > But even though I am a little weak in math, I think that 2 real numbers contain more information
          > than a single real number.

          One real number and two real numbers can both encode infinite information, and the same "size" infinite, Aleph-one [wikipedia.org].

          However, I would be really surprised if quantum mechanics allowed us to store a real number in the energy of a photon, I'd assume some discretization taking place, making it Aleph-zero instead. And relativity would bound the amount of energy we can store to at mos

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cnettel ( 836611 )
          Energy, and hence frequency, isn't well-defined. You have a probability distribution there, just like anything else. (It helps to remember how energy and momentum relates for a photon.) The method used for emitting, and the history of the beam, will determine what that distribution looks like, but you can "easily" be able to send signals with a very well-determined average frequency (let's say 30 digits), but where the variance in each individual instrument, even without introducing any error in the measuri
      • While IAOAPIT (I am only a physicist in training) and I'm not taking quantum mechanics until next semester, I don't believe that photon frequency can assume any value. The energy of a photon is quantized, so the frequency (related to energy by E=hf) should be also. Granted, this is quite a fine quantization (so fine that it took scientists a while to realize that it WAS quantized) but it can't encode an infinite amount of information.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
        The problem is that the image isn't quantified either, you need to "teach" the quantum how to quantify the image to properly encode it.

  • Reminds me of a short story... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fredklein ( 532096 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:40AM (#17695124)
    This reminds me of a short story (by Clarke or Asimov, I think). It's the far future, and increasingly dense data storage (the terms "notched quark" and "nudged quark" are used) means all of Humanities knowledge fits into a single file cabinet-sized drawer. All the rest of the world-wide internet-like system consists of indexes, indexes of indexes, and indexes of indexes of indexes of... well, you get the idea. One day a worker comes across an error, and forwards it to his boss. It keeps getting sent up the chain of command until a Master Troubleshooter realizes that to fix it, he needs to refer to the original datastore location. He enters the command to find the physical location of the datastore... and gets the same error.

    Uhh-oh. :-)
    • Is that the one where they had an entire encyclopedia encoded onto a bar of fixed length by scoring it at a precise position such that by dividing the two lengths, the rational binary number contained all of the bits of the encyclopedia?

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      MS Fnd in a Lbry

      HAL DRAPER

      From: Report of the Commander, Seventh Expeditionary Force,
      Andromedan Paleoanthropological Mission

      What puzzled our research teams was the suddenness of collapse
      and the speed of reversion to barbarism, in this multigalactic
      civilization of the biped race. Obvious causes like war, destruction,
      plague, or invasion were speedily eliminated. Now the outlines of the
      picture emerge, and the answer makes me apprehensive.

      Part of the story is quite similar to ours, according to those who
      know ou

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lahi ( 316099 )
        Thanks for posting that. I was just thinking of posting a link, but you beat me to it by posting the entire thing.

        I think of that story very often these days. Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with information storage and retrieval, without having read that story first.

        -Lasse

  • Links to the researchers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:55AM (#17695256) Journal
    Howell's home page [rochester.edu]
    Boyd's home page [rochester.edu]

    The article isn't a good match with any project listed there.

    The idea of storage by slowing something down goes back to a comically ancient technology, which was converting bits to sound waves and sending them through tubes of mercury to be detected electrically milliseconds later.

    • Re:Links to the researchers (Score:4, Informative)

      by Richard Kirk ( 535523 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @12:51PM (#17695630)
      In about 1968, IBM had an optical memory where about 2 Km of optical path was folded into something the size of a filing cabinet using mirrors, and 1 bit was circulating endlessly. Optical fibres transparent enought to do this did not happen for years. This geta a brief mention in... http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_196 8.html [ibm.com]
      • Another approach with the same underlying concept is to shine your laser at a distant object with a reflector, the moon for example. Light that comes back from the reflector is repeated. The amount of information you can then store depends on you switching speed and distance of the object while access time is dictated by the distance of the object. For the moon, worst case access time would be 2.4 seconds.
        It's not very dense or fast but it is a neat idea.
  • You could store as delayed and compressed wave signals... an incredibly elaborate matrix of data. It would be interesting to use something other than a physical mask to create the interference in the wave... say another set of photons in the form of a laser... would this be a form of holographic storage?
    • "You could store as delayed and compressed wave signals... an incredibly elaborate matrix of data. It would be interesting to use something other than a physical mask to create the interference in the wave... say another set of photons in the form of a laser... would this be a form of holographic storage?"

      Virtual transistors made of nothing but photons interfering with or reinforcing each other at the nodes of a 3D matrix in empty space. And if a task suddenly required a few terabytes of temporary stora
  • http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/1 9/1646212 [slashdot.org]

    ... where the storage device travelled at a reduced speed of light.

    CC.
  • The setup looks like the kind of setup you'd use for holography. Split the beam, part goes to the object, part gets used as a reference.

    Anyways, the researcher is delaying the arrival of the photon by 100 nanoseconds (my guess is that this is the time it takes to traverse the cesium gas chamber as compared to it not being there. He is not storing the photon in any reasonable definition of the word storage. It merely gets delayed by its passage through the gas.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pooua ( 265915 )
      camperdave: "The setup looks like the kind of setup you'd use for holography. Split the beam, part goes to the object, part gets used as a reference."

      The holographic setup you describe is a special case of optical interferometers using path difference. However, despite the schematic simularity of the illustration used in the press release to the holographic setup you mentioned, the simularity is superficial. As far as I can tell, the optic setup used by Dr. Howell is not for the purpose of causing holograph

  • Better coverage ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by CharlesEGrant ( 465919 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @12:40PM (#17695566)
    I suspect the original press release [rochester.edu] and the articles on Science Daily [sciencedaily.com] and PhysOrg [physorg.com] are FUBAR. I think an article in the Washington Post [rochester.edu] is probably more accurate. Unfortunately the Phys. Rev. Letter web site doesn't seem to have the actual paper publicly available yet.
  • ... it would seem that it might be possible to improve a lot on the image resolution of the best optical telescopes.

    From the admittedly simplified diagram of the components, it would not seem to be out of the question for this notion to be included in future orbiting camera platforms, whether for scientific or spying purposes. Imagine if the Mars Orbiter had this sort of image resolution capability, or even the Hubble Space Telescope (or its replacement).

  • If this were true, one profound implication... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Saturday January 20, 2007 @01:19PM (#17695802)
    If this information-encoding method were true (single photon carrying megabytes of information), then there would a profound implication:

    Because a computer of a given mass could then theoretically be used to completely store information of a physical structure of real objects (position and properties of each atom), these systems could then completely simulate/emulate these real objects of a mass larger than the mass of the computer, even if not in realtime. That enables a large variety of applications IF it is additionally possible to acceptably scan the data of the makeup of real objects. You could theoretically have a simulation of our physical universe, without having to use the mass of the universe to make that simulation!

    Major roadblocks would be the depredation of data on the light over time, and requirements of isolating the data - if the properly shielded case for a 'light hard drive' needed to be heavy enough, or the energy needed to maintain the data were enough, it could make production impractical, even if it could do what we wanted.

    Very interesting research, if the data 'storage' ends up being what they think it is.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
      Let's not forget that our photon here isn't the only one that can have an infinite nmumber of states (if it even can have that). Encoding the data would take an infinite amount of time unless you're willing to lose data by limiting the length of any number involved.
    • That is a very good point.
      However, take into account that fact that light can be teleported too, through quantum entanglement. Combine this with quantum computers, and then you have something really scary.
  • Did they store the image on ONE photon, or did they store it on MULTIPLE photons. Also, they didn't define what they meant by 'image'. Did they mean 'image' in a sense like storing a photograph of yourself, or did they mean 'image' in the sense that it is an energy level that only codes for ONE PIXEL in an image? From the "UR" sample images, it appears that they were able to only code each individual photo so that it functions as a pixel, rather than an image. Remember, there is a difference between pixels

    • Did they store the image on ONE photon, or did they store it on MULTIPLE photons. Also, they didn't define what they meant by 'image'. Did they mean 'image' in a sense like storing a photograph of yourself, or did they mean 'image' in the sense that it is an energy level that only codes for ONE PIXEL in an image? From the "UR" sample images, it appears that they were able to only code each individual photo so that it functions as a pixel, rather than an image. Remember, there is a difference between pixels and images.

      Sometimes, I think that researchers and engineers get so excited about things that they forget what they are talking about and are so eager to proclaim their new 'discovery' to the world that they tend to over-exaggerate and/or forget what exactly they really did.

      As blown out of proportion as their claim is, it is really cool that they were actually able to code photons as pixels.

      If photons can encode as pixels, and we can also teleport protons, this means that not only can you store information as protons, but there is no such thing as distance anymore. It boggles the mind. This sort of technology really would change EVERYTHING. I hope it changes everything for the better, because I'm not sure humanity is ready for this. Imagine if we discovered that we could manipulate all the matter in the universe through quantum mechanisms. I mean imagine if we actually prove that the whole m

    • Did they store the image on ONE photon, or did they store it on MULTIPLE photons. Also, they didn't define what they meant by 'image'. Did they mean 'image' in a sense like storing a photograph of yourself, or did they mean 'image' in the sense that it is an energy level that only codes for ONE PIXEL in an image? From the "UR" sample images, it appears that they were able to only code each individual photo so that it functions as a pixel, rather than an image. Remember, there is a difference between pixels
  • Surely, 640kb ought to be enough ?

    This is really really interesting though. I can sort of get my head around the idea of the single photon grabbing that much quantum info on the way through the stencil - but how the hell is that info retrieved ? Any ideas ?
  • All the phsyics stuff aside it sounds like they aren't actually achieving any kind of fancy compression or whatever.

    It's like say ok my compression algorithm is "this picture of CmdrTaco is 01 and this picture of CowboyNeal is 00". This algorithm would dramatically compress the picture of CmdrTaco but the decrompression program would have to have the picture of CmdrTaco stored in it in the first place to decompress the file.

    All the real information is being stored in whatever they are using to map whatever

  • The Same News Story Twice on /. In Two Days (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pooua ( 265915 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @05:15AM (#17700776) Homepage
    I just wondered if anyone noticed that this news story is exactly the same as the one /. posted under the heading, Slow Light = Fast Computing [slashdot.org], on January 19?
  • OK, the linked article is rubbish. But in fact you can send quite a lot of information using one photon provided the sender and receiver can resolve its frequency to the necessary degree and the available bandwidth is sufficient. If you have a channel with a bandwidth of, say, 10 MHz, and you can resolve the frequency of a single photon to 1 kHz, then in theory each photon can be assigned to one of 5000 bands each 2 kHz wide, i.e. it can store approx. 12 bits.

    How you do this, of course, is left as an exerci

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