Slow Light = Fast Computing

yohaas writes "The Washington Post is reporting that scientists have been able to slow the speed of light while still maintaining its ability to transmit information. The researchers have even developed a way to 'tune' the process, modulating how fast or slow the light goes within controlled circumstances. From the article: 'Scientists said yesterday that they had achieved a long-sought goal of slowing waves of light to a relatively leisurely pace and using those harnessed pulses to store an image. Physicists said the new approach to taming light could hasten the arrival of a futuristic era in which computers and other devices will process information on optical beams instead of with electricity, which for all its spark is still cumbersome compared with light.'"

Comments

Hothouse?

[LordPhantom]

Well...ok, but...

Howell and his colleagues created a four-inch-long chamber filled with cesium gas heated to about 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

I'm guessing that this isn't going to be coming to the desktop anytime soon.... even a major datacenter might balk at the energy costs of doing this versus a parallel traditional solution.

One possible method for that...

[tpjunkie]

Is that the stencil is actually a fourier transform hologram, printed out on film. This would look like a pattern of seemingly random dots, but a focused beam of light would resolve the hologram image, even if sent photon by photon over time on a detector.

Moo

[Chacham]

FTA:

Howell and his colleagues created a four-inch-long chamber filled with cesium gas heated to about 212 degrees Fahrenheit. When they sent pulses of laser light through that gas, the cesium atoms put the brakes on the leading edge of that wave, creating a photonic traffic jam.

So Cesium slows things down....

Yet, this artcle which was reported on Slashot here, says

In the most striking of the new experiments a pulse of light that enters a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas is pushed to speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light. That is so fast that, under these peculiar circumstances, the main part of the pulse exits the far side of the chamber even before it enters at the near side.

I'm a bit confused. Does Cesium speed thing up or slow things down?

Implications for cameras

[pHatidic]

Does this mean we could take, say, one second worth of light coming into a camera and then slow it down so that we could get a picture at a super high shutter speed at any point during that one second period?

Re:Interference

[Lord Crc]

It's not a single photon interfering with itself.

The interference pattern will occur even if there's only one photon in the apparatus at a time (that is, a photon hits the detector before a new one is generated).

See this page for instance.