[Wendell] Photon memory

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
1

Wendell (Sorry if i spelled your name wrong) i remember at one point during the tek you were talking about transmitting information at or near the speed of light. So i figured you might be intrested in this.

Well get this, scientists have manage to "freeze" light inside of a crystal. 

(Artical: http://www.gizmag.com/stopping-light-inside-crystal/28610/)

My thoughts are, how is the light stored? If it is stored in a stream of photons that can be minipulated, like having a know distance (say a couple nanometers or something) then reading the light in that area as on or off, could this be used for a fast way to trasmit data now that we can slow the light down enough to "read" it?

Here is my question, Do you think this could be a type of possible "data" storage?

For anyone else reading this, what are your thoughts?

2

Photons are too transient in and of themselves. This appears to be some sort of crystal structure that reacts to a burst of photons. I haven't dived into the physics but I gather it is a bit like glow-in-the-dark paint. It glows when first in the darkness, but it doesn't glow forever. IBM was working on some holographic storage. I think, but not sure, that graphene or something may be used with a laser for high-density storage. Entropy catches up with you at small scales -- right now even DRAM densities are such that alpha decay is kind of a serious problem that has to be mitigated even in non-error corrrecting ram to an extent.