"Controlling and manipulating quanta of coherent acoustic vibrations—phonons—in integrated circuits has recently drawn a lot of attention, since phonons can function as unique links between radiofrequency and optical signals, allow access to quantum regimes and offer advanced signal processing capabilities. Recent approaches based on optomechanical resonators have achieved impressive quality factors allowing for storage of optical signals. However, so far these techniques have been limited in bandwidth and are incompatible with multi-wavelength operation. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a coherent buffer in an integrated planar optical waveguide by transferring the optical information coherently to an acoustic hypersound wave. Optical information is extracted using the reverse process. These hypersound phonons have similar wavelengths as the optical photons but travel at five orders of magnitude lower velocity. We demonstrate the storage of phase and amplitude of optical information with gigahertz bandwidth and show operation at separate wavelengths with negligible cross-talk."
Basically they found a way to store the exact peroperties of a light signal in a sound wave.
This means that the quanta of light can be stored in another form and then I assume reconstructed in a reverse process.
This means that the entire information that is stored in it is preserved rather than a sampled approximation.
This sounds like an acoustic delay element (used in electronics, primarily analog electronics for video/audio and other analog signal processing voodoo boxes) for optics.
This is research into photonic (optical fiber) links and how to store several different colors (frequencies) in a vibrating material. The vibrating material is still a transmission but because it to 100,000x slower than light, it represents "storage."
(In case you are confused, this research is just about the storage, and not the optical link.)
To anyone without a physics background, And just in case the phrase lattice vibration quasiparticle doesn't leap out of you, by way of analogy consider ripples in a pond. Particles are well-defined ripples which propagate while virtual particles our secondary effects of interaction between particles or the background "water" itself. Meanwhile quasiparticles in this case are things which behave very much like the first kind of ripple, within the context of a solid crystal lattice.
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This means that the quanta of light can be stored in another form and then I assume reconstructed in a reverse process.
This means that the entire information that is stored in it is preserved rather than a sampled approximation.
This sounds like an acoustic delay element (used in electronics, primarily analog electronics for video/audio and other analog signal processing voodoo boxes) for optics.
This is research into photonic (optical fiber) links and how to store several different colors (frequencies) in a vibrating material. The vibrating material is still a transmission but because it to 100,000x slower than light, it represents "storage."
(In case you are confused, this research is just about the storage, and not the optical link.)
For those wondering, phonons are lattice vibration quasiparticles, they aren't elementary particles.