  Using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), it is possible to delay
and store light in atomic ensembles. Theoretical modelling and recent
experiments have suggested that the EIT storage mechanism can be used as a
memory for quantum information. We present experiments that quantify the noise
performance of an EIT system for conjugate amplitude and phase quadratures. It
is shown that our EIT system adds excess noise to the delayed light that has
not hitherto been predicted by published theoretical modelling. In analogy with
other continuous-variable quantum information systems, the performance of our
EIT system is characterised in terms of conditional variance and signal
transfer.
