I don't understand the physics involved. How is it possible to imprint a atom of light (a photon) with data? I would really enjoy learning about this technology...
most likely you or pretty much anybody will never understand the physics of this. i don't get it and my roommate who is about to graduate with a physics major doesn't get it. you probably have to study this specific topic for years to understand it.
Part of it is getting hung up on the "single photon" terminology, which makes you think of light as existing solely as a particle. First of all, photons aren't atoms (!= proton), they're subatomic. More importantly for this application, light has this really weird physics property of existing as (or exhibiting properties of) both a particle and a wave. So perhaps a better analogy/simplification than "imprinting data onto an atom" would be something like "storing information in the diffraction patterns of a wave." By knowing how waves act, you can analyze such patterns and movements and "play the wave backwards" to determine the original shape (stencil) that formed it.
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I don't understand the physics involved. How is it possible to imprint a atom of light (a photon) with data? I would really enjoy learning about this technology...
most likely you or pretty much anybody will never understand the physics of this. i don't get it and my roommate who is about to graduate with a physics major doesn't get it. you probably have to study this specific topic for years to understand it.
Part of it is getting hung up on the "single photon" terminology, which makes you think of light as existing solely as a particle. First of all, photons aren't atoms (!= proton), they're subatomic. More importantly for this application, light has this really weird physics property of existing as (or exhibiting properties of) both a particle and a wave. So perhaps a better analogy/simplification than "imprinting data onto an atom" would be something like "storing information in the diffraction patterns of a wave." By knowing how waves act, you can analyze such patterns and movements and "play the wave backwards" to determine the original shape (stencil) that formed it.