January 22,
2007
Move over CD. . . . Scientists discover way to
store image on photon
Howell
John Howell, associate professor of physics, and his
team have discovered a new technique for storing a digital image on a
photon. It’s a potential breakthrough because not only were they able
to store the image but also retrieve it entirely intact. The new
technique could lead to more effective ways to store large amounts of data
on light.
A “U” and an “R.” A
digital image of those two letters is the first to be encoded on a
photon and retrieved, fully intact. The optics breakthrough was
made by a research team led by John Howell, associate professor of
physics.
First image stored and retrieved from a single photon.
While the initial test image consists of only a
few hundred pixels, a tremendous amount of information can be
stored with the new technique that may open the door to optical
buffering—storing information as light.
“It sort of sounds impossible, but
instead of storing just ones and zeros, we’re storing an
entire image,” says 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.”
“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,” says Ryan
Camacho, Howell’s graduate student and lead author on the
article published this month in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“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.”
Howell’s group used a completely new
approach that preserves all the properties of the pulse. The
buffered pulse is essentially a perfect original; there is almost no
distortion, no additional diffraction, and the phase and amplitude of
the original signal are all preserved.
“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,” says 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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