EnglishLady
Veteran Expediter
Discovery News
Remember when you could barely fit a few digital photos on a USB storage stick? In the future we won't even need solid objects to carry around our files. We'll use vapor. This new method for storing images could represent an important leap for quantum computing and communications.
Physicists at the Joint Quantum Institute, which is jointly run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland, successfully stored and replayed frames from a short movie in room temperature atomic gas for the first time. Details of their demonstration were just published in the journal Optics Express (abstract).
We already use light signals to store information -- think about the holographic technology embedded in CDs. A group at the institute led by adjunct physics professor Paul Lett and atomic physics postdoc Quentin Glorieux just took that light signal storage to the next level.
To achieve the storage and retrieval, they used a setup called a "gradient echo memory." Basically the physicists encoded two movie frames -- each showing the letters "N" and "T" -- in photons. As Adi Robertson from The Verge helpfully explained, those photons were sent into a tiny cell filled with a cloud of room temperature gas called rubidium. When a magnetic field was switched on, the images were absorbed. When it was switched off, the information was emitted.
The physicists played back the two movie frames successfully multiple times, although they reported that only about 8 percent of the original light was redeemed. Captures from a high-speed camera recording published in their journal article show the increasing distortion. Fortunately, they expect that rate to improve with more practice.
With atomic vapor storage, a quantum Internet is just around the corner. As one commenter responding to an article on The Verge about the research aptly put it: "Cloud storage. Literally."
Remember when you could barely fit a few digital photos on a USB storage stick? In the future we won't even need solid objects to carry around our files. We'll use vapor. This new method for storing images could represent an important leap for quantum computing and communications.
Physicists at the Joint Quantum Institute, which is jointly run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland, successfully stored and replayed frames from a short movie in room temperature atomic gas for the first time. Details of their demonstration were just published in the journal Optics Express (abstract).
We already use light signals to store information -- think about the holographic technology embedded in CDs. A group at the institute led by adjunct physics professor Paul Lett and atomic physics postdoc Quentin Glorieux just took that light signal storage to the next level.
To achieve the storage and retrieval, they used a setup called a "gradient echo memory." Basically the physicists encoded two movie frames -- each showing the letters "N" and "T" -- in photons. As Adi Robertson from The Verge helpfully explained, those photons were sent into a tiny cell filled with a cloud of room temperature gas called rubidium. When a magnetic field was switched on, the images were absorbed. When it was switched off, the information was emitted.
The physicists played back the two movie frames successfully multiple times, although they reported that only about 8 percent of the original light was redeemed. Captures from a high-speed camera recording published in their journal article show the increasing distortion. Fortunately, they expect that rate to improve with more practice.
With atomic vapor storage, a quantum Internet is just around the corner. As one commenter responding to an article on The Verge about the research aptly put it: "Cloud storage. Literally."
