Current Event: Physicists Successfully Store and Retrieve Nothing
Despite the satirical title, teams of Physicists from the U. of Calgary and the Tokyo Institute of Technology recently published papers (and here) detailing their feat of storing a ‘squeezed vacuum’ by apparently reducing the amplitude of a quantum-mechanically interpreted EM wave to zero. ScienceNow has a more clear detailing (with pictures) than I seem to be able to give, and the /. article may provide further illumination.
The researchers suggest that this technique may be able to be used to facilitate a more secure transmission of secret keys between end hosts in the years to come.
Comment by Slava Chernyak
March 10, 2008 @ 10:59 pm
Indeed – this sounds a little bit like quantum entanglement, where you can have two systems in a mutually related quantum state without locality. The difficulty, however, seems to be in using this technique to actually transfer information. So far, it seems that even though a quantum-entangled system can determine the outcome of one measurement as soon as the other is performed, it seems that it is not possible to use this to transmit information.