Whoa, Nellie!
Although this separation process involves distorting the pulse-storing BEC – and hence the nature of the revived pulse – it is completely deterministic, which means that no quantum information is lost. By doing so, the team was able to store the pulse for up to about 1.5 s, shattering the previous record of about 600 ms. Furthermore, the fidelity of the revived pulse – the ratio of output energy to input energy – was more that 100 times better than previous systems.
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Nice find.
The revival fidelity after 1.5s is 0.5%. (PRL 103 233602 (2009) page 3 column 2). So it’s nice that the storage time is so long, but 99.5% of the time you don’t get your photon back.
I have some vague memory that room-temperature vapor cells can have similar storage times (100′s of ms) with better fidelities, but I may be off-base there.
But after that party-crashing bit of negativity, I should note that it is amazing the way they were able to preserve the pulse imprint in the condensate despite all the mean-field interactions and wave propagation and inelastic collisions and whatnot. I skimmed the paper, but I’m still not sure how they managed to pull it off.