IT’S like catching a moonbeam – using a cloud of vapour to capture images made of light itself. Right now, the result looks like something you’d see on a faulty LED display, but it could one day form the basis of a new type of computer memory.
First, rubidium atoms are exposed to a “pump” laser, putting them into an excited quantum state. This makes them transparent to pulses of light from a second laser, known as the “probe” beam, which carries information such as an image formed by shining the beam through a mask.
When the beams are turned off…
