Japanese scientists cage light
PrintBreakthrough for quantum computing
Posted in Storage, 21st December 2006 18:34 GMT
Free whitepaper – Avoiding costs from oversizing data center and network room infrastructure
Scientists have used silicon crystals to trap light and slow it down to the lowest speed ever recorded in the material. The breakthrough is a step towards light-based storage for quantum computers.
Researchers at Japanese telco NTT used man-made photonic crystals, which contain nanoscale holes, to achieve the feat. The cavity which controlled the light was less than ten millionths of a metre long.
The photon-trapping set-up slowed the light down to just 5.8 kilometres per second - 50,000 times less than the speed of light in a vacuum - by actually trapping it in the cavity for a nanosecond.
Last year, a team at Harvard "froze light" to demonstrate how photons could be used to bear information in an optical computer, replacing electrons. The Japanese research adds the ability to trap them for RAM-style memory.
The power to control light is seen as a key development for quantum information and communication, which promises a step change in computing power because of the greater number of states a quantum information carrier can take than in current simple electron-driven microprocessors.
Current early applications of quantum information technology centre around cryptography. More here.
The research is due to be reported in the January edition of the journal Nature Photonics. ®
Free whitepaper – Fundamental Principles of Air Conditioners for Information Technology
Enabling the Agile Data Center
Straight Talk with Dell: Sending out an SaaS
New storage architectures make SSDs more cost-effective
Dell PowerEdge R710 solution vs. Dell PowerEdge 2850 solution
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
At what point do servers become HPC beasts?
The state of the x86 server estate
Large Hadron Collider team flicks switch on Xeon grid
Open-sourcers promise cloud elephant won't trample your code