Ultra-Dense Optical Storage on One Photon

Andreaskem submitted this story about researchers being able to encode an image into a photon and to later retrieve it intact. From the article: "It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera — this is like a 6-megapixel camera... You can have a tremendous amount of information in a pulse of light, but normally if you try to buffer it, you can lose much of that information... We're showing it's possible to pull out an enormous amount of information with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio even with very low light levels."

Comments

Re:To Clarify

[Myrv]

They simply say one photon passes through the mask at a time. They didn't say the entire image was reconstructed using that single photon.

This sounds very similar to the double slit experiment were you send single photons through a double slit and record where they land on a screen placed behind the slits. Each photon will only light up one spot on the screen but if you collect enough samples you see a pattern start to emerge that looks like the interference pattern you would expect if light passed through both slits simultaneously. Basically, each photon which passes through the slits interfers with itself to to form the interference pattern.

In the article they are simply firing the photon through a mask with a pattern in it instead of a double slit. The photon acts as if it passed through all parts of the mask at the same time. But to reconstruct the image they would have to sample many photons passing through mask.

From what I can gather the important part of the article is that they have been able to slow down each photon in order to buffer it. So you can send 100 photons through the mask (one after another) then buffer those photons for 100 ns and then pass them on to a detector that reassembles the image from the 100 or so photons. I'm also guessing they can't slow down multiple photons at a time (at least not reliably) so the ability to serialize the photons is important as well.

Re:A photon carries a lot of information

[unchiujar]

Not so, :) A single number can store a huge amount of information. Your hardrive is one single very long binary number. If you define a way of retrieving information you can store images as numbers (binary, hex, octal,decimal or otherwise).