Storing Light In Chips

Roland Piquepaille writes "Recently, researchers have "stopped light" by storing light pulses in hot or extremely cold gases (check these former stories on Slashdot or at BBC News Online). Now, scientists from Stanford University have devised a method to store light pulses under ordinary conditions. In Light-storing chip charted, Technology Research News says this opens the way for all-optical communications switches, quantum computers and quantum communications devices. The researchers plan to demonstrate this technique by trapping microwave signals within a year. They think that a prototype which works at optical frequencies could be made in two to five years. This overview contains more details and references."

Comments

Re:Practicality in Displays

[mean pun]

LCD's do that already! They stay in their state until they get a signal to change their brightness. They arent scanned like CRTS are! Thats why they look more clear/are thinner etc/.

That's wrong on a lot of levels: LCDs do not store light, they selectively block it. Liquid Crystals (that give LCDs their name) do not stay in a fixed state on their own, but must be regularly aligned. Small and old displays use scanning very similar to CRTs, modern and large displays have a memory cell for each pixel.

Re:Schrodinger

[andy666]

It isn't Copernicus' equations that are used for spacecraft, but Newton's F=ma, Newton's law of gravitation, and an occasional use of General Relativistic corrections.

Re:Is it really storing light?

[Angstroman]

Yes, the concept (it is only a theoretical concept, not a chip, in the paper) does store the light. When the optical pulse is completely within the postulated structure (meaning only a very short pulse can be stored), a modulation of the refractive index causes the fields associated with the pulse to be stored in the internal cavities of the crystal. Reversing the refractive index change causes the stored fields to reform a traveling wave, which exits the structure. The way that you know that the pulse has been stored in the computer simulations is that after the first refractive index change, nothing comes out of the structure. After the second change, a pulse emerges that has the same shape as the one that was sent in.

Re:Speed of light?

[Weird O'Puns]

If you had just looked at some links in your Google search you would have found this:

To be precise, what we usually call the "speed of light" is really the speed of light in a vacuum (the absence of matter). In reality, the speed of light depends on the material that light moves through. Thus, for example, light moves slower in glass than in air, and in both cases the speed is less than in a vacuum. Link