Slashdot Log In
Storing Light In Chips
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Feb 21, 2004 08:42 AM
from the not-grandma-utz's dept.
from the not-grandma-utz's dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Recently, researchers have "stopped light" by storing light pulses in hot or extremely cold gases (check these former stories on Slashdot or at BBC News Online). Now, scientists from Stanford University have devised a method to store light pulses under ordinary conditions. In Light-storing chip charted, Technology Research News says this opens the way for all-optical communications switches, quantum computers and quantum communications devices. The researchers plan to demonstrate this technique by trapping microwave signals within a year. They think that a prototype which works at optical frequencies could be made in two to five years. This overview contains more details and references."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Schrodinger (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Schrodinger (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Schrodinger (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Schrodinger (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Schrodinger - my daughter tried it. (Score:3, Funny)
She then picked the oozy furball up, stood on a chair and dumped him.
He spun around a bit and landed on his feet. The buttered toast ws still attached, but was now on his belly, butterside down.
No perpetual motion, but proof that cats always land on their feet, and buttered toast always lands butter
Re:Schrodinger (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Schrodinger (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Not hard (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not hard (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, but who microwaves chips...I use salsa.
As for light... (Score:2)
I just press the "indigo" button,and if by magic, it releases the light it has stored. Amazing!
Re:Not hard (Score:3, Funny)
Practicality in Displays (Score:3, Interesting)
Ie, instead of refreshing a CRT, if the light was held until it was no longer needed?
Might pave the way to some new display technologies =)
Re:Practicality in Displays (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
I think thats already in use. (Score:2)
Re:Practicality in Displays (Score:2)
Re:Practicality in Displays (Score:5, Informative)
That's wrong on a lot of levels: LCDs do not store light, they selectively block it. Liquid Crystals (that give LCDs their name) do not stay in a fixed state on their own, but must be regularly aligned. Small and old displays use scanning very similar to CRTs, modern and large displays have a memory cell for each pixel.
Parent
Re:Practicality in Displays (Score:2)
Obviously vacuum tubes can't compete with transistors. Transistors are orders of magnitude faster, don't burn out, are cheaper, etc. But, vacuum tubes were sure a hell of an improvement of relays, which were used on a few earl
quantum? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:quantum? (Score:2)
So far I've seen.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm wondering if light or other waves stored in such a fashion could be used as a battery of sorts.
Re:So far I've seen.. (Score:2)
Re:So far I've seen.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Quantum Leaping? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Quantum Leaping? (Score:2, Informative)
Please tell me how this time it's different. (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this sound like another one of those "breakthroughs" in optical/quantum computation where prototypes are "just around the corner" and commercialization is "just a few years away", yet it never happens?
Tell me how this time it's different. Does it work on standard fab processes?
I would really love a CPU with a terahertz clock. I guess it would still be I/O bound, though.
Re:Please tell me how this time it's different (Score:5, Insightful)
"The work would have been more impressive had the authors demonstrated the stopping of light experimentally, he added." Raymond Chiao, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Yup one of those 2-5 years things again, like so much else...
Parent
Re:Please tell me how this time it's different (Score:2, Interesting)
so what does it take to get something like this off the ground? Seems like the only way sometimes is lots of media/marketing hype to get a bunch of cash so you can actually do the work.
I have all this stuff redy to show (have shown several times), and I'm still broke and unemployed. Give me one good reason I shouldn't be
Re:Please tell me how this time it's different. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry for any misspellings or typos. I just crawled out of bed literally.
Re:Please tell me how this time it's different. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you misunderstand me. I think it's great that we have pure researchers pushing out the limits of human knowledge, and am grateful for their work. I certainly am glad they have results to publish.
I think the main problem is that we have a popular science press that, in talking down to its readers, always reports pure research as if it were applied research. While fun to read, the effect can be that technology becomes over-promised and over-hyped too early in its development. This can cause good tech to
Re:Please tell me how this time it's different. (Score:2)
There's a big wide grey area between methodical, conservative science and over-hype. Within this gray area is also a fine line that can only ever be seen in retrospect. There definately needs to be a safe path for moving ideas from pure research through product development to commercial appliction, and capitalism is probably the worst way to do that, except for all the others.
Loo
Optical gets bypassed by other denser tech? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure that optical will have a role in the future. The ability to send ultrahigh bandwidth signals over long-distance fibers is extremely valuable. All-optical switching/routing would certainly improve latency. The ability of light beams to nondestructively pass through other light beams also makes it ideal for denser chip-to-chip and device-to-device interconnects. Finally, holographic memory storage migth have a future (although it would not surprise me if current HD densities are probably on par with expected future holographic information densities)
That's why I doubt that we will see an all-optical future. Other technologies already provide better densities in circuits and storage. Only in the realm of communications, does optical really shine.
Re:Optical gets bypassed by other denser tech? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Optical gets bypassed by other denser tech? (Score:4, Interesting)
What are the alternatives? It is possible to build deformity free cubes of silicon. However, in a 3-dimensional chip the heat generated (grows with the cube of the height of the chip) is dissapated through surface area (grows with the square of the height of the chip) so it compounds the second problem.
A probable alternative is the substitution of man-made diamond wafers for silicon. Diamond is far more heat-resistant than silicon, and can be created deformity free by plasma layering processes. Unfortunately the technology is still nacent and wafer sizes are still miniscule.
Optical computation would clearly provide a heat advantage. Imagine the newest supercomputer powered by a flashlight. But regardless, the greatest advantage of this technology, if realized and implemented for even a small set of basic algorithms, will be quantum computers.
Parent
Is it really storing light? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it really storing light? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is it really storing light? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is it really storing light? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is it really storing light? (Score:3, Informative)
A better way of describing what this stuff does is that it records the state of the wave at every point in the medium. When they want to regenerate it, they recreate the pulse using that information. Effectively, all they're doing is
Another Step (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like a step in the right direction. I wonder if it can be used for memory or just buffers of a sort. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone expects a transition from electrical computers in the next decade, but the breakthroughs on the optical front seem to be accelerating.
Diamond transistors X Light-based networks (Score:4, Interesting)
What if you can not only use diamonds for electronic media, but also use the refractive nature of diamonds for storing and moving light?
Couldn't the different light "switches" and other networking technology be added into diamonds as they are grown?
Could you use something like that to grow 3 dimensional computer chips and storage media?
Also aren't diamonds pretty much destruction proof... could you were a future computer in a ring or a harddrive in a earing?
Not a big deal (Score:2)
Have been doing this for years... (Score:4, Funny)
Opens the way... AGAIN! (Score:3, Funny)
I know I've heard this spin several times before on optical processors, and just about every new advancement touts such claims. So I ask when WILL we see 'the way' as actually being "opened???"
Of course this reply opens the way for people to flame me silly. And that IS a fact!
Sorry to be Cynical (Score:2)
Lights last longer in the freezer (Score:2)
Other light bulbs around the house seem to burn out all the time and my wife is always turning up the furnace - coincidence? I think not.
Do lights last longer in the north? What's the deal with those Northern Lights I hear about?
Re:Speed of light? (Score:5, Informative)
If you had just looked at some links in your Google search you would have found this:
To be precise, what we usually call the "speed of light" is really the speed of light in a vacuum (the absence of matter). In reality, the speed of light depends on the material that light moves through. Thus, for example, light moves slower in glass than in air, and in both cases the speed is less than in a vacuum. Link [utk.edu]
Parent
Mirror Trap? (Score:4, Informative)
No, here's what you need. You take a microwave transmitter and blast a second or so of bits at the moon. Wait three or four seconds, it echoes back. Receive it. Correct the errors (you did use error-correcting code, didn't you?), then send it to the moon again. And when it echoes back transmit it again. And so forth. First trick: you can correct and retransmit simultaneously with the reception. So you can have more data in flight than you have memory for on Earth. Second trick: you'll note that the power you get back is far less than what you sent out. But you can still retain the data. You have to act as a repeater, but that's all.
You could do this with mirrors, but the mirrors will probably be too close together to store very much. Still, a laser, and a nearly 90 degree angle, and the light will zig-zag a lot, and you might have a few hundred feet before you need a repeater. Damned dusty mirrors! Damned non-transparent air!
Third trick: with the moon, you now have a sort of bubble memory, but it's over 100,000 miles long. You could do the same trick with 100,000 miles of fiber-optic cable. But if you could slow down the speed of light you could use shorter cable (or store more in the same cable without having to drive the frequency and the bit rate really high). Also, you could shorten the period, which means your data is available sooner.
If you can really slow down light to a few cm per second, then you can store a lot of stuff. But you will need power for the repeating.
(What would be better is to make windows out of this stuff. You could look out the window and see what was happening outside yesterday. But imagine the solar power applications if you made the glass twelve hours thick instead of twenty-four. Sunlight would shine in during the daytime, and come pouring out at night!)
Parent
Re:Stargote Atlontis (Score:2)
Re:Bright Chimps (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not a new idea (Score:3)
About ten years before, he had special light-delaying windows installed. Guarenteed to provide 10 years of sunlight from the tropics inside the house.
His family was killed in a tragic accident. Staring in the windows, he was able to see images of them, the delayed images light, going about their business, inside his own house.