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

[cubic6]

Well, if the light is held, it's not getting to your eyes, and thus not making a visible picture. So in that particular instance, I would think that this wouldn't help very much.

quantum?

[freerecords]

quantum computers are still, and will be, a very very long way off. it is not enough to say that one single development will speed their coming, rather one obstacle will be replaced by another - sod's law

Re:Please tell me how this time it's different

[robbot]

Yeah I was excited reading the article until this quote.

"The work would have been more impressive had the authors demonstrated the stopping of light experimentally, he added." Raymond Chiao, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Yup one of those 2-5 years things again, like so much else...

Re:Schrodinger

[Winkhorst]

Hey, it took centuries to get around to using Copernicus's orbital equations with spacecraft. This is the beauty of basic research. It eventually has a practical use, but you can't base its validity on how long it takes to use it. And you have to distinguish between research and the ability to invent something. As John W. Campbell once pointed out, the Classical Greeks had everything necessarily to invent the phonograph, though it wasn't until Edison that somebody got around to doing it. In that particular case, it was the mental rut into which the Greeks had worn themselves that kept them from making much practical progress, thus leading to the return to power of irrational religion and the eventual rise of the Dark Ages.