Paving the way for sustainable ultrafast computers that process data at the speed of light
How does the Marvel movie character Ant-Man generate such powerful energy from such a small body? The secret lies in the “transistors” in his suit that amplify and process weak signals. . Transistors that amplify electrical signals in the traditional way lose heat energy, limiting the speed of signal transfer and thus degrading performance. What if we could go beyond that limit and develop a high-performance suit that is light and small yet retains heat energy?
A POSTECH team from the Department of Physics, Professors Park Kyung-dak and Koo Yong-jung, and a team from ITMO University in Russia, led by Professor Vasily Kravtsov, have developed a “nano-exciton” using intra- and inter-layer excitons in heterostructure-based semiconductors. jointly developed the transistor. Addresses existing transistor limitations.
Excitons, which control the light emission of semiconductor materials, can freely convert light and materials in an electrically neutral state. . A semiconductor heterobilayer, which is a stack of two different semiconductor monolayers, has his two types of excitons: horizontal intra-layer excitons and vertical inter-layer excitons.
The optical signals emitted by the two excitons have different light, duration and coherence times. This means that selective control of two optical signals will enable the development of a 2-bit exciton transistor. However, in addition to the diffraction limit of light, the heterogeneity of semiconductor heterostructures and the low emission efficiency of interlayer excitons have made it difficult to control intra- and interlayer excitons in nanoscale space.
In previous research, the team had proposed a technology to control excitons in nano-level space by pressing semiconductor materials with a nanoscale tip. Here, researchers were able to remotely control exciton density and luminous efficiency for the first time based on tip polarization without direct contact with the excitons. The most important advantage of this method of combining photonic nanocavities and spatial light modulators is that the excitons can be reversibly controlled, minimizing physical damage to the semiconductor material. Also, nano-exciton transistors that harness ‘light’ can help process large amounts of data at the speed of light with minimal loss of thermal energy.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is permeating our lives more rapidly than we ever expected, and it takes vast amounts of data for learning to provide relevant, practical answers for users. Is required. As more fields leverage AI, more and more information needs to be collected and processed. This research is expected to propose a new data processing strategy suitable for the era of data explosion. Yeonjeong Koo, one of his co-lead authors on the research paper, said:
Original: You can now process data at the speed of light!
Than: Pohang University of Science and Technology | ITMO University
