Scatterings
Sound Stores Light, Briefly
A system that uses off-the-shelf components provides a way to store light as sound, briefly, in optical fiber.
Data pulses propagate toward the left, while an intense “write” pulse propagates to the right. Their nonlinear interaction transfers most of the data pulse energy into the write pulse and some sound in the fiber. Before the sound fades, a read pulse interacts with it. Read pulse energy is converted into data pulses.
A system that uses off-the-shelf components provides a way to store light as sound, briefly, in optical fiber. Postdoc researcher Zhaoming Zhu and Daniel Gauthier at Duke University and Robert Boyd at the University of Rochester reported that they have stored a train of data pulses in a fiber, in acoustic excitations, for up to 12 ns (Science 318, 1748).
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