Resource Center:   Linux       Home/Home Office       Convergence      Enterprise       E-Biz  

Search Archive

Home Site Map Media Kit Print Media Kit Feedback Help  Newsletters jobs@Cybermedia Contact Us

• For the most updated version of this V&D100 survey data, go to voicendata.com • Learn about the upcoming CyberMedia events


Home > MIRROR TO THE FUTURE
 

 Brocade partners IBM to expand IP networking footprints in India
 HP launches 'Touchsmart' printers
 AMD appoints Nicholas Donofrio
 SITA to conduct three-day expo
 iBall introduces Li'l Book
 Indian CIOs more progressive compared to global counterparts: IBM
 Greenlight Technologies partners with Logica
 Unlimited access with Aten digital KVM extension solution
















Insight Enablers

Tyresoles increases productivity by 15%

Creating Enterprise Services Architeture Road Map

Visible benefits with ERP

In Trading improves business productivity by 40%

Godrej Case Study

Communicating With Light
 
The technique may give scientists a new degree of control over fiber-optic communication and quantum information processing
 
DQC NEWS BUREAU
 
Monday, March 19, 2007

 

Harvard University physicists have, for the first time, stopped and extinguished a light pulse in one part of space and then revived it in a completely separate location. They accomplished this feat by completely converting the light pulse into matter that travels between the two locations and is subsequently changed back to light.

Matter, unlike light, can easily be manipulated, and the experiments provide a powerful means to control optical information. The findings, published this week by Harvard University researchers in the journal Nature, could present an entirely new way for scientists and engineers to manipulate the light pulses used in fiber-optic communications.

“We demonstrate that we can stop a light pulse in a super cooled sodium cloud, store the data contained within it, and totally extinguish it, only to reincarnate the pulse in another cloud two-tenths of a millimeter away,” said Lene Vestergaard Hau, Mallinckrodt Professor- Physics and Applied Physics-Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard.

Hau and her co-authors-Naomi S Ginsberg and Sean R Garner, found that the light pulse can be revived, and its information can be transferred between the two clouds of sodium atoms by converting the original optical pulse into a traveling matter wave, which is an exact matter copy of the original pulse, traveling at a leisurely 200m per hour. The matter pulse is readily converted back into light when it enters the second supercooled clouds-known as Bose-Einstein conden­sates-and is illuminated with a control laser.

“The Bose-Einstein conden­sates are very important to this work because within these clouds atoms become phase-locked, losing their individuality and independence,” Hau said. “The lock-step nature of atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate make it possible for the information in the initial light pulse to be replicated exactly within the second cloud of sodium atoms, where the atoms collaborate to revive the light pulse,” he added.

Within a Bose-Einstein condensate, a cloud of sodium atoms cooled to just billionths of a degree above absolute zero, a light pulse is spatially compressed by a factor of 50 million. The light drives a controllable number of the condensate's roughly  1.8 million sodium atoms to enter into quantum superposition states with a lower-energy component that stays put and a higher-energy component that travels between the two Bose-Einstein condensates. The amplitude and phase of the light pulse stopped and extinguished in the first cloud are imprinted in this traveling component and transferred to the second cloud, where the recaptured information can recreate the original light pulse.

The period of time when the light pulse becomes matter, and the matter pulse is isolated in space between the condensate clouds, could offer scientists
and engineers a tantalizing new window for controlling and manipulating optical information; researchers cannot now readily control optical information during its journey, except to amplify the signal to avoid fading. The new work by Hau and her colleagues mark the first successful manipulation of coherent optical information.

“This work could provide a missing link in the control of optical information,” Hau said. “While the matter is traveling between the two Bose-Einstein condensates, we can trap it, potentially for minutes, and reshape it, change it, in whatever way we want. This novel form of quantum control could also have applications in the developing fields of quantum information processing and quantum cryptography.”

Ginsberg, Garner, and Hau's work was supported by the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research, the National Science Foundation, and the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

DQC NEWS BUREAU

Page(s)   1  


End of the article

Related CIOL links   External links  

 



Read Previous MIRROR TO THE FUTURE...






ZTE:Leading CDMA Technology


Extraordinary Networks:Freedom of Choice







Previous Stories

SOLID STATE DISK: Time For HDDs To Retire?

IP voice Solutions: Not just cheap calls

Structured cabling: Structured cabling Cat6's Home, 10G Can Wait

Message boards

Discuss this and many other IT topics at the
CIOL message board

Google
  Web dqchannels.com

 
DQ Channels Other CyberMedia web sites   Cyber India Online Ltd.
 

 CyberMedia India Ltd
Copyright © CyberMedia All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.
Usage of this web site is subject to terms and conditions.
Broken links? Problems with site? Send email to webmasterciol@cybermedia.co.in