Store Photons. Then Make Them Intract With Each Other

It's amazing to see the development in this area. Just a few years ago, we were amazed at the accomplishments coming out of Lene Hau's lab in being able to not only store photons, but also to "replay" them back. Now comes this, which is another step in refining and improving the capability of storing photons.

What Charles Adams and colleagues at Durham University have now done is come up with a way of storing individual optical photons in highly excited states of an atomic gas. Once stored, the photons can be made to interact strongly, before being released again. An important feature of the technique is that it uses microwaves, which are also used to control some types of stationary qubit. 

 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.6007v3.pdf

Apparently, this is to be published in PRL.

Definitely a commendable accomplishment here in the evolution of our capability of using photons for quantum communications.

Zz.