This is pretty cool. Some German physicists have done some awfully clever quantum stuff and frozen light for a whole minute within a crystal. What makes this even more impressive is that they used it to store and successfully retrieve information – a simple image of three light-coloured stripes.
I think this may prove to be an iconic image in the history of IT, because this technique may enable storage in optical computers in the same way that mercury delay lines did in the early days of electronic computing, before we had RAM.
And wouldn’t it make a great plot device for a Star Trek episode?
More information here – thanks to Anthony Albertyn for the link…
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