By Rob Waugh
One young man was inspired by the lingo of the University of Maryland's paper, especially the storage of images in the atomic memory, and contrived a song which he performs on a YouTube video clip.
As yet, there are not many practical uses for the technique, which stores information in tiny vials of rubidium, by beaming light into a 20cm long tube.
To play back, the magnetic field is flipped backwards, the control beam turned back on, and the atoms start to move in the opposite direction.
The point? There is one, beyond simply creating a new storage medium, and presumably inspiring George Lucas to re-release the Star Wars films in gaseous form.
The gas can store 'quantum' information - and once it's refined, could be a crucial building block for the computers of the future.
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| As yet, there are not many practical uses for the technique, which stores information in tiny vials of rubidium, by beaming light into a 20cm long tube |
‘The big thing here,’ said Lett, ‘is that this allows us to do images and do pulses (instead of individual photons) and it can be matched (hopefully) to our squeezed light source, so that we can soon try to store ‘quantum images’ and make essentially a random access memory for continuous variable quantum information.
The thing that really attracted us to this method---aside from its being pretty well-matched to our source of squeezed light---is that the ANU group was able to get 87% recovery efficiency from it - which is, I think, the best anyone has seen in any optical system, so it holds great promise for a quantum memory.’
WATCH VIDEO HERE
