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."

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Links to the researchers

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Howell's home page
Boyd's home page

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.