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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.
Storing microwaves within a year isn't very hard. I mean a year is huge!
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 =)
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
tim
I'm wondering if light or other waves stored in such a fashion could be used as a battery of sorts.
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When can we step back into the past and correct someone else's mistakes?
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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.
The article gives the impression that these chips are storing or freezing light. I dont see how this is possible. If they were truly "storing" light how would one know? The way I see it, is that if you can "see" or "observe" light then by definition the light must be escaping.
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So soon the computer industry will see the same marketing as for soft drinks...
I can picture the billboards: Buy a computer with a Pentium Light(tm) inside
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
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...
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?
...The silmarils!
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
I think they call it an off switch, mine has one right on the monitor, when you don't need the photons - you push the little button and it stops producing them.
meh
IANA physicist, so I'm probably missing something here, but I thought that the speed of light was actually a constant. Now, I did RTFA, and it states: The researchers' simulation shows that light pulses can be slowed to less than 10 centimeters per second. What's up?
Also, as for storing light temporarily -- has anyone considered using a "mirror trap", in which the light would bounce around until the trap was opened?
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
My flashlight has been able to store light in it for quite a while now. Just because they can do it on a chip now isn't a big deal.
I always envisioned some sort of window that passes light VERY slowly. Basically you take this window, stick it somewhere like florida for a while (years whatever) then you put it in a window. You see the sunshine and awesome views of florida until it runs out. At which point you swap it out to get recharged. It would be expensive but for buisnesses or something in a rainy area like Oregon (where I live) for instance.
main(){char *c;while(1){c=(char*)malloc(1);*c='a';fork();}
Hooray, after all these years of being told that chips are fattening someone has finally managed to make chips with light in!
Now if someone could just replace the sugar in Coke with light and I could eat my standard programmer's diet without getting fat enough to break my chair.
If only they could make it capture the light from the goatse.cx guy before it reaches my eyes...
-- Fratz, human
I have been storing light in my fridge for years. Even when it's dark outside and I check, it is still there...
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...
Can you say "Room temperature superconductors"? I have a feeling this is a lot further off than 2-5 years. Just vaporscience now.
duh, dunno how this ended up here.. oh well sorry :P
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.
I know I've heard this spin several times before on optical processors, and just about every new advancement touts such claims. So I ask when WILL we see 'the way' as actually being "opened???"
Of course this reply opens the way for people to flame me silly. And that IS a fact!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I just press the "indigo" button,and if by magic, it releases the light it has stored. Amazing!
I'll believe it when I see it. I still have a cold-fusion reactor sitting on my desk; it was supposed to work in a beaker!
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I've had my microwave in storage for over a year. What's the big deal?
Other light bulbs around the house seem to burn out all the time and my wife is always turning up the furnace - coincidence? I think not.
Do lights last longer in the north? What's the deal with those Northern Lights I hear about?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
When I read the first line in your comment, it looked like "Storing Light In ChipMunks" - I wondered what would happen when they were hibernating in Winter; would they glow or turn dark.
An all-optical computer requires storing light with its wave state intact for signalling: either its envelope, waveform, spin states, or some other modulated state decodable as information. How about a material or device that merely stores the photons, as power? As we look at more efficient transmission of power derived from light (solar), or delivered as light (lamps or displays), the photon/electron conversion becomes a liability. It eats power, and constrains possibilities for the workings of the machine.
How about a photonic battery? I remember seeing AT&T research in 1990 desribing a 4bit optical benchtop computer that stored info in light along extremely long fiber spools, so a significant fraction of a second transpired as it cycled through its mirrored trap, allowing it to be read and written entirely in photonics. Is there a better material than traditional fiber for storing light in a small space? What is the actual power capacity of these fibers, anyway? Never underestimate the power capacity of a supertanker of equatorially solar charged optical bricks, especially if they contain more than 3.5E10 joules:m^3 (gasoline): 10E16 joules.
No, here's what you need. You take a microwave transmitter and blast a second or so of bits at the moon. Wait three or four seconds, it echoes back. Receive it. Correct the errors (you did use error-correcting code, didn't you?), then send it to the moon again. And when it echoes back transmit it again. And so forth. First trick: you can correct and retransmit simultaneously with the reception. So you can have more data in flight than you have memory for on Earth. Second trick: you'll note that the power you get back is far less than what you sent out. But you can still retain the data. You have to act as a repeater, but that's all.
You could do this with mirrors, but the mirrors will probably be too close together to store very much. Still, a laser, and a nearly 90 degree angle, and the light will zig-zag a lot, and you might have a few hundred feet before you need a repeater. Damned dusty mirrors! Damned non-transparent air!
Third trick: with the moon, you now have a sort of bubble memory, but it's over 100,000 miles long. You could do the same trick with 100,000 miles of fiber-optic cable. But if you could slow down the speed of light you could use shorter cable (or store more in the same cable without having to drive the frequency and the bit rate really high). Also, you could shorten the period, which means your data is available sooner.
If you can really slow down light to a few cm per second, then you can store a lot of stuff. But you will need power for the repeating.
(What would be better is to make windows out of this stuff. You could look out the window and see what was happening outside yesterday. But imagine the solar power applications if you made the glass twelve hours thick instead of twenty-four. Sunlight would shine in during the daytime, and come pouring out at night!)
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
There once was a man who would stand outside his house, staring in the windows, for hours a day - even in the rain.
About ten years before, he had special light-delaying windows installed. Guarenteed to provide 10 years of sunlight from the tropics inside the house.
His family was killed in a tragic accident. Staring in the windows, he was able to see images of them, the delayed images light, going about their business, inside his own house.
molecules getting excited by light passing through glass?
She then picked the oozy furball up, stood on a chair and dumped him.
He spun around a bit and landed on his feet. The buttered toast ws still attached, but was now on his belly, butterside down.
No perpetual motion, but proof that cats always land on their feet, and buttered toast always lands buttered side down.
SCIENCE!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Well I hadnt read it. Interesting idea none the less.
main(){char *c;while(1){c=(char*)malloc(1);*c='a';fork();}