Penultimate Reality

As I’m sure many of you are no doubt aware, both light and matter exhibit characteristics of both waves and particles, in what’s known in the physics world as wave-particle duality. The consequence of this perhaps somewhat eerie concept is that light can be observed as a particle, the photon.

But what does this brief quantum mechanical lesson have to do with technology? Well, several articles have recently been written discussing a team of researchers at the University of Rochester, and their recent work into storing an entire image on a single photon. This particular article’s title, Ultra-Dense Optical Storage — on One Photon immediately brings to mind images of amazing new storage devices, capable of storing exabytes in a single cube.

It seems there’s a long way to go, still. A lot of neat scientific research, when reported to the general public, gets sensationalized, to get more people interested. What this particular group has done, however, is nonetheless impressive, managing to slow down light while allowing it to retain the information it carried. This could be the first step to fast optical computers or ultra-dense storage devices in the future.

While the concept sounds neat, I’m thinking it’ll be several years or even a couple of decades before the technological developments that occur as a result of this research make their way into consumer products. It’s an unfortunate reality that things take quite some time to go from the lab to the store shelves. Still, it’s another idea to think about as far as the future of storage that I’ve written about previously.