University of Arizona researchers hope to pave the way for faster computers using light-based optical computing, a marked improvement from the semi­conductor-based transistors that currently run the world. Researcher Mohammed Hassan said the future of electronics will be based instead on using laser light to control electrical signals, opening the door for the establish­ment of optical transistors and the development of ultrafast optical electronics.

According to Hassan, the fastest semi­conductor transistors can operate at a speed of more than 800 gigahertz. He said one of the primary concerns in developing faster technology is that the heat generated by continuing to add transistors to a microchip would eventually require more energy to cool than can pass through the chip. Now, Hassan and his colla­borators discuss using all-optical switching of a light signal on and off to reach data transfer speeds exceeding a petahertz, measured at the attosecond time scale. 

While optical switches were already shown to achieve information processing speeds faster than that of semi­conductor transistor-based technology, Hassan and his co-authors were able to register the on and off signals from a light source happening at the scale of billionths of a second. This was accomplished by taking advantage of a characteristic of fused silica. Fused silica can instan­taneously change its reflec­tivity, and by using ultrafast lasers, Hassan and his team were able to register changes in a light's signal at the atto­second time scale. The work also demonstrated the possibility of sending data via light at previously impossible speeds.

“This new advancement would also allow the encoding of data on ultrafast laser pulses, which would increase the data transfer speed and could be used in long-distance communi­cations from Earth into deep space,” Hassan said. “This promises to increase the limiting speed of data processing and infor­mation encoding and open a new realm of information techno­logy.” (Source: U. Arizona)

Reference: D. Hui et al.: Ultrafast optical switching and data encoding on synthesized light fields, Sci. Adv. 9, adf1015 (2023); DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf1015

Link: Attomicroscopy and Attosecond Electron Imaging Laboratory, Dept. of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA