Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/21/japanese_light_trap/
Japanese scientists cage light
Breakthrough for quantum computing
Posted in Storage, 21st December 2006 18:34 GMT
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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" [1] 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 [2].
The research is due to be reported in the January edition of the journal Nature Photonics. ®