Scientists at the University of Rochester have stored an entire image-worth of data within a single photon, promising unsurpassed quantities of data storage for the era of quantum computing that lies before us.
Led by Associate Professor of Physics John Howell the team projected light through a stencil into a 4-inch cube of cesium gas. Upon entering the cube, the image was slowed and compressed, allowing over 100 compressed and slowed images to be stored within the same cell.
It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we’re storing an entire image, said Howell. 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.
Optical buffering, the process of storing data within photons, has been a hot topic within the computer industry because of the speed boosts it promises in regard to both processing and networking. While other researchers have successfully store data in photons, matters of signal distortion and refraction have made it impossible to retrieve data in the same state at which it was stored. Howell’s new method, however, preserves all of the original properties of photon pulses, and allows that data to be manipulated within the 100 nanosecond time frame in which the proton is kept in stasis.
The parallel amount of information John has sent all at once in an image is enormous in comparison to what anyone else has done before, said Alan Willner, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and president of the IEEE Lasers and Optical Society. To do that and be able to maintain the integrity of the signal—it’s a wonderful achievement.




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What the average Joe and Jane can do with a quantum computer might be very dangerous. Soon all knowledge of everything will be available to everyone. Knowledge is power and that power is very dangerous if given to the wrong people.

Okay - I'm going to go out on a limb here - and call that impossible.

That article is wrong - has to be.

I would like more info please.

Okay - here's a less edited version of the same article from PhysOrg. This one actually makes sense. The image is not stored in one photon, but 100. That I can believe.

The article says:


I think it means that hundreds of images like the UR image can be stored as these light pulses within a tiny volume/area. Since neither article makes an effort to quantize the photons in 'one pulse', I don't see why it cannot be taken as one pulse = one photon.

The image is made with many pulses, but essentially "stored" as one photon:


Remember, photons are very very strange particles...

I'm still in disbelief that it's a single photon, regardless of how strange a particle it is.

How...just how? I understand the whole quantum "passes through everything at once" thing, but at some point the particle needs to be observed, collapsing the wavefunction.

Unless he's managed to find some way to encode the entire wavefunction of a photon without any observation of the photon occurring - I just can't understand how this would work, even at a quantum mechanical level.