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scientists hope to make a miniature sound-and-light show in fibers with the intention of producing not entertainment but ultrasensitive optical switches or the means of transporting bits in future all-optical computers.
The new scheme being developed by scientists at Ben-Gurion University and Tel Aviv University uses sound waves to help slow light nearly to a halt under conditions (ordinary materials at room temperature) more practicable than for most other slow-light experiments. Richard Tasgal ([email protected]) and his colleagues use as their medium a so-called Bragg grating fiber; the UV-sensitive core of a fiber is exposed through a mask to ultraviolet light.
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Originally posted by junglelord
Hi, I gave the link to the post.
I also posted 1/4 of the link information.
Its used for data in stead of electrical bits, its photon bits.
If computers are going to get into the quantum age they will be photon.
basic use is just a 1 and 0 (binary code) same as electric bits today are usually 5v and 0v
more advance use will be quantum superposition.
Thats a little more complicated but its both a 1 and a 0 at the same time
Honest
[edit on 25-5-2007 by junglelord]
Originally posted by spacedoubt
junglelord
I'm sure sy.gunson was asking for a laymans explanation for this "net effect" of slowing down light. Not a redirection to the original story.
Could you explain a little?
Is light slowing down? Or, is there a type of harmonic being created here?
Are light pulses are being turned into a type of standing wave, that is modulated by sound pressure?
Slowed Light Handed Off
Several years ago, physicists gained the ability to slow a beam of light in a gas of atoms; by manipulating the atoms' spins the energy of and information contained in the light could be transferred to the atoms in a coherent way (see PNU 521). By turning on additional laser beams, the original light signal, which we can think of as having been idling or temporarily stored in the atom cloud, could be reconstituted and sent on its way.
Now, one of the first researchers to slow light, Lene Hau of Harvard, has added an extra layer to this story. She and her colleagues, halting and storing a light signal in a gas of cold atoms-in this case a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of sodium atoms-then transfer the signal, now in the form of a coherent pulse of atom waves rather than light waves, into a second BEC of sodium atoms some 160 microns away, from which, finally, the signal is revived as a conventional light pulse.
This feat, the sharing around of quantum information in light-form and in not just one but two atom-forms, offers great encouragement to those who hope to develop quantum computers.
www.aip.org...
Hypersound, acoustic pulsation at 200 gigahertz frequencies, has been produced in the same kind of resonant multilayered semiconductor cavity as used in photonics. Physicists at the Institute des Nanosciences de Paris (France) and the Centro Atomico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro (Argentina) generate the high frequency sound pulses in a solid material made of thin gallium arsenide and aluminum arsenide layers. One can picture the sound, excited by a femtosecond laser, as being a short pulse of waves or equivalently as particle-like phonons, excitations pulsing through the stack of layers. These phonons are reflected at either end of the device, called a nanocavity, by further layers with a much different acoustic impedance acting as mirrors. Acoustic impedance is the acoustic analog of the refractive index for light.
Bernard Jusserand ([email protected], 33-1-4427-6980) says that he and his colleagues hope to reach the terahertz acoustic range. The wavelength for such "sound" is only nanometers in length. They believe that a new field, nanophononics, has been inaugurated, and that the acoustical properties of semiconductor nanodevices will become more prominent. THz phonons, and more specifically the reported nanocavities could, for example, be used to modulate the flow of charges or light at high frequency and in small spaces. THz sound might also participate in the development of powerful "acoustic lasers" or in novel forms of tomography for imaging the interior of opaque solids.
www.aip.org...
A scalable quantum computer chip for atomic qubits has been built for the first time by researchers at the University of Michigan (Christopher Monroe, [email protected]), offering hopes for making a practical quantum computer using conventional semiconductor manufacturing technology.
Exploiting the strange rules of the atomic world, quantum computers could potentially break top-secret codes and perform certain kinds of searches much more quickly than conventional computers.
Unlike a conventional computer's bits, which can have values of either 0 or 1, a qubit can possess a value of 0 and 1 simultaneously, analogous to a light switch that's on and off at the same time.