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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."
This reminds me of a short story (by Clarke or Asimov, I think). It's the far future, and increasingly dense data storage (the terms "notched quark" and "nudged quark" are used) means all of Humanities knowledge fits into a single file cabinet-sized drawer. All the rest of the world-wide internet-like system consists of indexes, indexes of indexes, and indexes of indexes of indexes of... well, you get the idea. One day a worker comes across an error, and forwards it to his boss. It keeps getting sent up the chain of command until a Master Troubleshooter realizes that to fix it, he needs to refer to the original datastore location. He enters the command to find the physical location of the datastore... and gets the same error.
:-)
Uhh-oh.
Any photon has a frequency (wavelength, energy, whatever). The frequency is not quantified and can assume infinite values. By generating a photon with the correct energy, I have encoded, in theory at least, a vast amount of information. Of course your ability to encode and decode very much information is limited by the available technology and the noise environment. :-)
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The article isn't a good match with any project listed there.
The idea of storage by slowing something down goes back to a comically ancient technology, which was converting bits to sound waves and sending them through tubes of mercury to be detected electrically milliseconds later.
Sounds like the quantum bomb problem - detecting something by using less than a single photon.
Actually, you can travel a light year in significantly less than a year, depending on how one defines "light year" and "year". For example, if you accelerated at 1 g towards Alpha Centauri (fun fact: 1 g is just over 1 ly/yr^2!), you would reach Alpha Centauri in about 2.25 years. Of course, looking back the original distance of 4 light years would now be shortened (thanks to that fella Lorentz). Bonus fact: as you pass Alpha Centauri, you will be covering 5 light years (as measured in the Earth frame of reference) per year (as measured in your own frame of reference)!
See, Einstein wasn't so mean after all.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If this information-encoding method were true (single photon carrying megabytes of information), then there would a profound implication:
Because a computer of a given mass could then theoretically be used to completely store information of a physical structure of real objects (position and properties of each atom), these systems could then completely simulate/emulate these real objects of a mass larger than the mass of the computer, even if not in realtime. That enables a large variety of applications IF it is additionally possible to acceptably scan the data of the makeup of real objects. You could theoretically have a simulation of our physical universe, without having to use the mass of the universe to make that simulation!
Major roadblocks would be the depredation of data on the light over time, and requirements of isolating the data - if the properly shielded case for a 'light hard drive' needed to be heavy enough, or the energy needed to maintain the data were enough, it could make production impractical, even if it could do what we wanted.
Very interesting research, if the data 'storage' ends up being what they think it is.
Ryan Fenton