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Don’t Call It Vaporware: Scientists Use Cloud of Atoms as Optical Memory Device

From NIST Tech Beat: April 3, 2013

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Contact: Chad Boutin


This brief animation (click link to launch mp4) by the NIST/JQI team shows the NIST logo they stored within a vapor of rubidium atoms and three different portions of it that they were able to extract at will. Animation combines three actual images from the vapor extracted at different times.

Their work builds on an approach developed at the Australian National University, where scientists showed that a rubidium vapor could be manipulated in interesting ways using magnetic fields and lasers. The vapor is contained in a small tube and magnetized, and a laser pulse made up of multiple light frequencies is fired through the tube. The energy level of each rubidium atom changes depending on which frequency strikes it, and these changes within the vapor become a sort of fingerprint of the pulse's characteristics. If the field's orientation is flipped, a second pulse fired through the vapor takes on the exact characteristics of the first pulse—in essence, a readout of the fingerprint.




*J.B. Clark, Q. Glorieux and P.D. Lett. Spatially addressable readout and erasure of an image in a gradient echo memory. New Journal of Physics, doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/15/3/035005, 06 March 2013.