John Howell, associate professor of physics at the University of Rochester, and his team have discovered a new technique for storing a digital image on a photon. It’s a potential breakthrough because not only were they able to store the image but also retrieve it entirely intact. The new technique could lead to more effective ways to store large amounts of data on light.

A “U” and an “R.” A digital image of those two letters is the first to be encoded on a photon and retrieved, fully intact.

“It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we’re storing an entire image,” says Howell. “It’s analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera—this is like a 6-megapixel camera.”

Howell’s group used a completely new approach that preserves all the properties of the pulse. The buffered pulse is essentially a perfect original; there is almost no distortion, no additional diffraction, and the phase and amplitude of the original signal are all preserved.

What? Did you think they’d spell “Y-A-L-E”?