Converting light to sound for manipulating data

Ars Technica : Light moves too quickly for computer chips to process it. By the time a chip has determined how to route data encoded in light, the pulse has already passed by. To prevent signal loss, chips divert the light pulses and store data electronically, but that is a slow and inefficient process. Now a team of Australian researchers has developed a way to briefly slow down the light: They convert the light pulses into sound pulses and then back again. The technique isn’t new—it’s commonly used in lasers—but adapting the idea for data transmission required finding a way to create and propagate the sound waves with minimal data loss. The researchers converted a standard light pulse and then collected the signal with the full data load 3.5 ns later, which is a significant slowdown in transmission that doesn’t require storing the data electronically.