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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."
This was predicted by Schrodinger in the 30's - it really took them a long time to do it.
Anyone know if this would help out in display technologies?
Ie, instead of refreshing a CRT, if the light was held until it was no longer needed?
Might pave the way to some new display technologies =)
I'm wondering if light or other waves stored in such a fashion could be used as a battery of sorts.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Does this sound like another one of those "breakthroughs" in optical/quantum computation where prototypes are "just around the corner" and commercialization is "just a few years away", yet it never happens?
Tell me how this time it's different. Does it work on standard fab processes?
I would really love a CPU with a terahertz clock. I guess it would still be I/O bound, though.
I wonder if optical will simply be bypassed by other, already denser technologies. Semiconductor feature sizes are an order of magnitude smaller than a wavelength of light -- giving them at least a 100-fold advantage (assuming the an optical computer could even have useful feature sizes at wavelength scales). Commerically available HD densities are over 100 bits per micron-square. And this does not even count on any new nanotechnologies in circuits or storage.
I'm sure that optical will have a role in the future. The ability to send ultrahigh bandwidth signals over long-distance fibers is extremely valuable. All-optical switching/routing would certainly improve latency. The ability of light beams to nondestructively pass through other light beams also makes it ideal for denser chip-to-chip and device-to-device interconnects. Finally, holographic memory storage migth have a future (although it would not surprise me if current HD densities are probably on par with expected future holographic information densities)
That's why I doubt that we will see an all-optical future. Other technologies already provide better densities in circuits and storage. Only in the realm of communications, does optical really shine.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This seems like a step in the right direction. I wonder if it can be used for memory or just buffers of a sort. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone expects a transition from electrical computers in the next decade, but the breakthroughs on the optical front seem to be accelerating.
I do security
What I think about is the future ability to create custom and finely tuned diamonds with different amounts of "impurities" grown into it with .30nm amounts of detail.
What if you can not only use diamonds for electronic media, but also use the refractive nature of diamonds for storing and moving light?
Couldn't the different light "switches" and other networking technology be added into diamonds as they are grown?
Could you use something like that to grow 3 dimensional computer chips and storage media?
Also aren't diamonds pretty much destruction proof... could you were a future computer in a ring or a harddrive in a earing?
So if it has to be manually reversed, could you use it as a storage device? Eg, to store sunlight, or laser light for example?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
yep... perhaps completely off-topic, but I invented a new technology, which is "5 years off", however, I actually have code, I have a beta, I have simulators, and it's actually been shown.
so what does it take to get something like this off the ground? Seems like the only way sometimes is lots of media/marketing hype to get a bunch of cash so you can actually do the work.
I have all this stuff redy to show (have shown several times), and I'm still broke and unemployed. Give me one good reason I shouldn't be hyping the heck out of it just so I can put food on the table? Or tell me what I'm supposed to do with this stuff...
I wonder if this might eventually be a way to get around the size and power limitations of lasers... You could create a burst of laser light using a big clunky machine, freeze it, then take the light pulse with you. If you had a bunch of these pulses stored in, say, cartridges, you'd essentially have a light, ultra-portable laser with little need for a power supply, albeit one that will produce a limited number of pulses.