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

To Clarify

[logicnazi]

The Image is NOT encoded into one photon, at least not in a way that can be extracted again. Each individual photon is in a superposition of having gone all the possible paths and the set of those possible paths is the information to be extracted but when measured each photon will only reveal a small amount of information so it is only in the aggregate (by measuring lots of photons) that the initial image can be reproduced. At least this is what the article sounds like it is saying it wasn't very clear.

In fact it is probably best to think of this without quantum mechanics at all. What they did is pretty much like figuring out the shape of an object by shooting BBs at it and looking at which ones make it past the object.

The part that is supposedly new and interesting is the way they collected the photons at the other end. It didn't seem very clear on this but apparently by catching many of the photons in their device at one time it made it much easier to decode the image in the light.

Re:To Clarify

[drerwk]

Parent is right - article is not particlely clear.
By itself a photon can be described as having, location, and energy. Thanks to Heisenberg you can only know so much about location and energy at the same time. I don't recall what property fails to commute with spin, maybe time? But the total information in a single photon is at best 3 reals for location, a real for energy, and an imaginary for spin.

Re:To Clarify

[Teresita]

"Thanks to Heisenberg you can only know so much about location and energy at the same time."

Dern that Heisenberg. And you can also thank Einstein for the fact that it takes at least one year to travel one light-year.

Re:To Clarify

[CharlesEGrant]

rom 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.

The original press release is very poorly writen. A better article is in the Washington Post. Also, the title of the actual peer-reviewed article is on Howell's publication page as "All-optical delay of images using slow light" Ryan M. Camacho, Curtis Broadbent, Irfan Ali Khan and John C. Howell, Phys. Rev. Lett (in press). As you say, the centeral acheivement is in their ability to slow down the photons. Unfortunately the actual paper doesn't yet seem to be available as the Phys Rev Letter website. I think the business of encoding an image on a single photon is a confabulation by the author of the press release.

Re:To Clarify

[mspohr]

Heisenberg might have been here.

Re:Tomorrow's news

[Teresita]

"RIAA filed a suit against University of Rochester and all of its students for "Helping those damn, dirty pirates infringe on our copyrights!!"

They turned Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again" into a giant single number, and imprinted that number on the photon, thus making an illegal photon.

Re:Over simplification

[Dunbal]

Using just ONE photon to produce an image?

      Ahh, but what they fail to mention is that the image is of.... tadaa, the photon!