'Sounds impossible,' but U.S. team put image into single photon

[w1z4rd]

American researchers have put all the data from an image into a single photon, one of the particles that make up light and other electromagnetic phenomena.

The team was also able to retrieve the data, the letters UR for the University of Rochester where lead researcher John Howell is an associate professor of physics.

"It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we're storing an entire image," he said in a release Monday.

"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 researchers said in describing the experiment as an "optics breakthrough."

Read more... http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=...ml&cid=1112853218&sig2=JIVH1XZqPPHsse2NkA-y-g

 

[Geriatrix]

Anyone care to explain this to me in "Idiot" please? I'm stumped as to how you store matrix data in a single unit of energy...

 

[BobbyMac]

:dropjaw: wow, that's pretty insane.

 

[vespax]

progression...

 

[LabAnimal]

soo... what the're saying is... if they drop an atomic bomb, it will be porn pictures all over the place ???

"Squeezing that much information into so small a space and retrieving it intact opens the door to optical buffering — storing information as light," the team said.

Optical buffering is important because it's seen as one way to speed up computers — by using light to store information — but there are problems converting light signals to electronic signals.

Pretty incredible if you think about it!...

 

[zambussi]

There's more information stored on that single photon than in all the minds of Icasa, Papi, and most of our politicians put together !

 

[Sahyde]

Information stored on a photon

It's really quite simple.

Information can be defined in a number of ways. Member of certain Religions, Cultures or other groups or organizations who have a group specific vocabulary may communicate enormous amounts of information in only a few words because they understand the context. Similarly certain shapes and symbols convey meaning and/or information.

In this case, the image is not stored in a fashion that would be described as either serial or matrix. That is the "cool" factor of this discovery.

Simply put, the researchers allowed a light pulse consisting of a single photon to be directed at a stencil with the letters "UR" cut in it. (The research was done in the University on Rochester in New York State in the US.)

The conventional or intuitive thinking would be that by doing this one photon would either produce a single spot of light if that photon passed though an empty portion of the stencil or no spot if it struck an obstructed portion.

Here is where the "coolness" happens. Our intuitive result would be correct if photon particles behaved as other "particles" do. But, they don't. According the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, in addition to acting like particles they (photons) also posses the properties of waves. This means that in this experiment the SINGLE photon actually passed through ALL parts of the stencil at once! This produced a "shadow" of the stencil "on" the single photon; or rather it shaped the wave into an exact replica of the stencil.

This alone holds fantastic potential for data transmission if a method of reliably stenciling photons at high speed on the transmitting end and then reading the shadow at the receiving end could be devised. But the problem the researchers are having is also storage related. Their photon "buffering" only allowed, I think, about 100 photons to be slowed down in a chamber filled with a special medium. The millisecond and nanosecond buffering times might be enough to allow use in data transmission, when refined, but would not be useful for permanent or long-term storage and retrieval.

The researchers are confident, though, that those problems can be overcome.

One might ask, "Well, how in the world could we use shadows to store/transmit our jpegs?" That's not so hard either. Imaging if we could develop the apparatus to create a stencil containing millions or billions or trillions of bits much like an old punched card did back in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's. Then a SINGLE photon could be used to send that one image at the speed of light. And if a reliable long-term storage medium and retrieval system were to be developed can you imagine how much you could store? My guess is that the amount of information one could store on a single photon would be limited only by the amount one could fit on the stencil.

The potential of having all the knowledge of all mankind stored in a virtually infinitely small space really boggles the mind.

We really do live in an exciting time!