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

Ahem.

[Hawthorne01]

We don't say "slow light" anymore. We say "Luminescentally Challenged".

Re:Ahem.

[Quaoar]

How retarded.

Future performance whores will brag...

[Anonymous Coward]

...in terms of how small their underclock of c is.

Re:*cough*bullsheet*cough*

[ThanatosMinor]

Perhaps they meant only one photon at a time. The interference pattern that light creates on a screen does not depend on whether you send one photon through at a time or an entire beam.

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.

Meanwhile, scientists at..

[LM741N]

UC Santa Cruz have achieved a 1/1000 slowdown of light by passing a beam through a cloud of marijuana smoke.

That's not a pun, THIS is a pun!

[spun]

worst pun ever Boy, that sounded like a challenge.

Light, for all its flare, can't hold a candle to electricity's current ability to generate a buzz around computing!

Worst pun ever? Pfha! We have not yet begun to pun!

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.

The future is now! (tm)

[Itninja]

Physicists said the new approach to taming light could hasten the arrival of a futuristic era

I hate statements like this. How does a 'futuristic era' arrive? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it impossible to hasten the arrival of the future? And when the future does indeed arrive, will it not then be simply 'the present'?

Re:The future is now! (tm)

[Atzanteol]

And when the future does indeed arrive, will it not then be simply 'the present'?

Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at?!
Colonel Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that is happening now is happening now.
DH: What happened to then?
CS: We passed it.
DH: When?
CS: Just now. We're at now now.
DH: Go back to then!
CS: When?
DH: Now!
CS: Now?
DH: Now!
CS: We can't!
DH: Why?
CS: We missed it.
DH: When?
CS: Just now.
DH: When will then be now?
CS: Soon.

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?

Re:Moo

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The latter article is about phase velocity. Phase velocity is the speed at which the individual peaks and valleys of the signal appear to travel. But peaks and valleys aren't actual 'things' and you can't transmit information using them. (See here.) This latest story is about the rate at which you can transmit information, so it's about group velocity.

Despite the fact that the theory was worked out more well over a century ago, almost every modern pop science story about manipulating the speed of light leaves out these crucial points.

Re:*cough*bullsheet*cough*

[julesh]

There's no way a single photon makes a stencil image.

There's a well-known effect that when you perform Young's double-slit experiment with single photons, the interference patterns still remain. If a single photon can interfere with itself, I'm sure it can make an image.

Call me when they slow down darkness.

[bad_fx]

"No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."

A much better scientific description here

[viking80]

Here is a half decade old article that describes the process well. It also uses units such as nm and Kelvin instead of thigs like "seven times around the earth" and "about 450 degrees below zero"

http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/sf/topics/lightf reeze/lightfreeze.html

Re:Wrong Way

[geekoid]

but nobody would ever see you win!

Re:Why not?

[ceoyoyo]

Why's that? 212F is just the boiling point of water, heating up cesium gas isn't all that hard and you wouldn't need to maintain a very large volume at that temperature. A regular processor will quite rapidly get more than hot enough if you don't spend lots of energy cooling it.

Re:*cough*bullsheet*cough*

[mhall119]

Yes, but when they contact something, the act like a particle. Even in a dual slit experiment, a single photon will produce only a single contact, not a pattern. The pattern arises from the non-uniform distribution of multiple single photon contacts. The original comment's confusion was thinking that the hologram was produced by a single photon, rather than a succession of individual photons.

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.