Researchers at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris have managed to store light that propagates in an optical fiber and to release it later on demand. By causing interaction between the traveling light and a few thousand atoms in the vicinity, they demonstrated an all-fibered memory.
In the May 8th issue of the Physical Review Letters, Prof. Julien Laurat and his colleagues at Pierre and Marie Curie University report that they have devised optical memory integrated into an optical fiber. The team created a way to stop and store the light that usually propagates in a fiber at a speed as fast as 200,000 kilometers per second. This capability represents an important advance in optical communications, as fibers are at the heart of our worldwide telecommunication system, but also for a future quantum Internet, in which quantum information can be transported and synchronized between interconnected nodes.
"This work provides a demonstration of an all-fibered memory for light. We have been able to store the light and release it later into the fiber," says Baptiste Gouraud, a graduate student who designed this experiment and the lead author of the paper. "Previous demonstrations were based on free-space ensembles of atoms, not on a wave-guided implementation compatible with fibers used in networks."
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