Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

(PhysOrg.com) -- Engineers and physicists at Harvard have managed to capture light in tiny diamond pillars embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at a controllable rate.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The often counterintuitive quantum world of superposition, entanglement, and tunneling can greatly enhance applications as diverse as communication, information processing, and precision measurement. At the same time, photons have the equally attractive properties of low noise, light speed transmission, and ease of manipulation using conventional optics. However, due to the probabilistic nature of single photons, the two have never been integrated into a single system – until now.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A data memory can hardly be any smaller: researchers working with Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have stored quantum information in a single atom. The researchers wrote the quantum state of single photons, i.e. particles of light, into a rubidium atom and read it out again after a certain storage time