Wow, here’s an invention I never realised we needed: The world’s fastest barcode reader.

But I’m just showing my ignorance – today I have learned that barcodes are used much more widely than just at the supermarket checkout.

Yes, barcodes are one of the underpinning infrastructure technologies of our society. Sorting things out everywhere from shops to post rooms to blood banks. Current readers use either a mechanically scanned laser – the reflected light bounces back and gives the reading – or an optical scanner that takes a picture of the barcode. The scan rates of these lasers is about 100 – 1000 scans per second, and require the use of mechanical scanners and lots of optical-to-electrical converters.

But if that’s not fast enough for you, check out this paper in Applied Physics Letters (paper, press release)by Keisuke Goda and colleagues at UCLA. They use a fancy laser technique, where a laser pulse has the barcode’s image mapped onto it, and this in turn is mapped onto another waveform that is read with great speed by a single, stationary, optical-to-electrical converter. The limiting step is the speed of the laser pulse.

They reckon they can get a bar code reader that scans at a rate of 25 MHz – 10,000 times faster than the old methods Goda says, and in future this speed could be even faster. They say that faster and faster readers are needed by industry. PI Bahram Jalali explains: " “Eliminating the CCD camera and the mechanically steered mirrors from bar code scanners can prove valuable in applications that demand high-throughput bar code reading, such as industrial monitoring and retail supply line management.”