If this is truly a breakthrough and not just another step towards optical RAM, then this story at The Register should put smiles on a lot of faces.  Utilizing an indium gallium arsenide strip buried in gallium arsenide these researchers have found a way to make this material either transparent or opaque to light, and using that to dynamically record a 0 or 1.  This would imply that the speed of the RAM would only be limited by how quickly the material can switch from one state to the other. These theoretical DIMMs would need a minute amount of power, the abstract states 30 nW as the predicted power draw, which could eliminate heatspreaders as we know them today.  The security conscious may also be assuaged that the state will last for a matter of microseconds so there will be no more freezing RAM for snooping through later.

From the article on Nature.

"Japanese researchers are claiming a breakthrough in all-optical memory, one of the key bottlenecks remaining in the optical communications world.

The high throughput of optical communications systems brings its own problem: any function that can’t be performed in the optical domain demands an opto-electric conversion, creating a bottleneck in the system. This has put a premium on research into optical switching, amplification and signal regeneration."

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