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

[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.