Physicists Store, Retrieve a "Squeezed Vacuum"

An anonymous reader sends us to the site of Science Magazine for news that will interest those who have followed experiments to slow and stop light. Research groups in Canada and Japan have succeeded separately in storing a special kind of vacuum — a "squeezed vacuum" — in a puff of gas and then retrieving it a split second later. Such experiments might lead to advances in quantum encryption. At the very least they will help to illuminate the boundary between quantum and classical realms.

Comments

Re:Gas of Atoms

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there gases made up of things that are not atoms?

Yes. For the simplest example, the atmosphere is a gas of molecules, not atoms.

More generally, you can define a gas out of nearly any kind of particle. There's even such a thing as a "photon gas".

Re:Gas of Atoms

[pldd]

You can have gas made of molecules, a gas of photons, a gas of electrons, etc. As long as you have a large ensemble of free particles in a given volume you can call it a gas.

Re:That drawing board is getting a bit small...

[glwtta]

There are people alive right now that when they were born, germs were unknown

Holy crap, there are people running around who are over 330 years old? Man, those guys have lived :)

At no time in history has information advanced so much in so short a time.

Actually, with a few notable exceptions, this has been true of any time in history. But yeah, there's a difference in degree.

Re:There is no "Quantum Encryption"

[SeekerDarksteel]

There are some possibilities to use quanta (?) as signal carriers, but no encryption is involved. The theory is that if you wiretap such a signal, then the original receiver will find out. So it could maybe be called "Quantum Wiretap Detection" or the like. But since this is a physical thing that relies on theoretical models that are typically not exact, it is not actually known whether this is really secure. I seem to remember that there are actually possibilities to liesten in, found in te last few months.

The reason for the encryption in the name is that the idea is to exchange a private key over the secure (but very slow) channel, which will then enable encryption over an insecure channel. So you're correct that the name is misleading. To be more accurate, it should be called quantum key exchange, not quantum encryption.