Physicists at the University of Arizona led an international team to achieve optical switching of optical signals at attosecond speeds, enabling previously unattainable data transfer rates. An attosecond is 1 second in 100 minutes.
Imagine a home computer that runs a million times faster than the most expensive hardware on the market. Now imagine that level of computing power being the industry standard. Researchers at the University of Arizona hope to use light-based optical computing to pave the way for that reality. This is a significant improvement over the semiconductor-based transistors that currently power the world.
“Semiconductor-based transistors are embedded in all the electronics we use today. Mohammed Hassan, Assistant Professor in Physics and Optical Sciences. “They are part of everything from children’s toys to rockets and are a major component of electronics.”
Hassan is part of an international team of researchers who published a research article, “Ultrafast Optical Switching and Data Encoding in Synthetic Light Fields,” in Science Advances in February. U Arizona Physics Postdoctoral Fellow Dan Dan Hui physics graduate student Hussein Arkattan In addition to researchers from Ohio State University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, he also contributed to the article.
Semiconductors in electronics rely on electrical signals transmitted via microwaves to switch (allow or prevent) the flow of electricity and data, described as “on” or “off.” Hassan says the future of electronics is based instead on using laser light to control electrical signals, opening the door to the establishment of ‘phototransistors’ and the development of ultrafast optoelectronics. .
Since the invention of the semiconductor transistor in the 1940s, technological advances have focused on increasing the speed at which electrical signals are produced, measured in Hertz. According to Hassan, the world’s fastest semiconductor transistors can operate at speeds of over 800 gigahertz. Data transfer at that frequency is measured on the scale of picoseconds, or one trillionth of his second.
Computer processing power has increased steadily since the introduction of semiconductor transistors, but one of the main concerns in developing faster technology, Hassan says, is adding transistors to microchips. The heat generated by continuing ultimately requires more energy to cool down than it does to pass through. chips.
In their article, Hassan and his collaborators discuss using all-optical switching of optical signals on and off to reach data transfer rates in excess of petahertz measured on the attosecond timescale. doing. An attosecond is one hundredth of his second, which means that he transfers data a million times faster than the fastest semiconductor transistor.
Although optical switches have already been shown to achieve faster information processing speeds than semiconductor transistor-based technologies, Hassan and his co-authors have shown that switching on from light sources occurring on the scale of billionths of a second This was achieved by taking advantage of the properties of fused silica, a glass commonly used in optical systems. Silica glass can change its reflectance instantaneously, and using ultrafast lasers, Hassan and his team were able to record changes in the optical signal on the attosecond timescale. This work also demonstrated the possibility of transmitting data in the form of 1s and 0s, representing on and off, via light at speeds never before possible.
“This new advancement will also allow data to be encoded in ultrafast laser pulses, increasing data transfer rates and enabling them to be used for long-range communications from Earth to deep space,” Hassan said. increase. “This promises to improve the critical speed of data processing and information encoding, opening up new realms of information technology.”
Original: Optical switching at record speeds opens door to ultrafast light-based electronics and computers
Than: University of Arizona
