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posted by janrinok on Friday May 13 2022, @03:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can't-drive-55 dept.

Laser bursts drive fastest-ever logic gates:

A long-standing quest for science and technology has been to develop electronics and information processing that operate near the fastest timescales allowed by the laws of nature. A promising way to achieve this goal involves using laser light to guide the motion of electrons in matter, and then using this control to develop electronic circuit elements—a concept known as lightwave electronics.

Remarkably, lasers currently allow us to generate bursts of electricity on femtosecond timescales—that is, in a millionth of a billionth of a second. Yet our ability to process information in these ultrafast timescales has remained elusive.

Now, researchers at the University of Rochester and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have made a decisive step in this direction by demonstrating a logic gate—the building block of computation and information processing—that operates at femtosecond timescales. The feat, reported in the journal Nature, was accomplished by harnessing and independently controlling, for the first time, the real and virtual charge carriers that compose these ultrafast bursts of electricity.

The researchers' advances have opened the door to information processing at the petahertz limit, where one quadrillion computational operations can be processed per second. That is almost a million times faster than today's computers operating with gigahertz clock rates, where 1 petahertz is 1 million gigahertz.

"This is a great example of how fundamental science can lead to new technologies," says Ignacio Franco, an associate professor of chemistry and physics at Rochester who [...] performed the theoretical studies that lead to this discovery.

In recent years, scientists have learned how to exploit laser pulses that last a few femtoseconds to generate ultrafast bursts of electrical currents. This is done, for example, by illuminating tiny graphene-based wires connecting two gold metals. The ultrashort laser pulse sets in motion, or "excites," the electrons in graphene and, importantly, sends them in a particular direction—thus generating a net electrical current.

Laser pulses can produce electricity far faster than any traditional method—and do so in the absence of applied voltage. Further, the direction and magnitude of the current can be controlled simply by varying the shape of the laser pulse (that is, by changing its phase).

Journal Reference:
Boolakee, Tobias, Heide, Christian, Garzón-Ramírez, Antonio, et al. Light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04565-9)
Ignacio Franco, Moshe Shapiro, Paul Brumer. Robust Ultrafast Currents in Molecular Wires through Stark Shifts, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.126802)
Schiffrin, Agustin, Paasch-Colberg, Tim, Karpowicz, Nicholas, et al. Optical-field-induced current in dielectrics, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature11567)
Chen, Liping, Zhang, Yu, Chen, GuanHua, et al. Stark control of electrons along nanojunctions [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04393-4)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13 2022, @03:58AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13 2022, @03:58AM (#1244666)

    Could you please cut down the preamble and put the meat in the lovely summary?

    Thank you for your hard work.

    Sincerely,

    SN AC

    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday May 13 2022, @12:16PM (1 child)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 13 2022, @12:16PM (#1244713) Journal

      When we do that we get complaints that there is no context to the story. We can't win either way.

      We have provided several links so that you can read about it.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday May 13 2022, @02:47PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 13 2022, @02:47PM (#1244743) Journal

        No good deed goes unpunished.

        --
        To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Friday May 13 2022, @06:13AM (1 child)

    by driverless (4770) on Friday May 13 2022, @06:13AM (#1244683)

    ... faster than you can say Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Noon... Friedrich-Alexander-Universe-.... Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Elephant... URochester!

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday May 13 2022, @07:04AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday May 13 2022, @07:04AM (#1244687) Journal

      Of course "FAU" is shorter than "URochester".

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Friday May 13 2022, @09:06AM (1 child)

    by Opportunist (5545) on Friday May 13 2022, @09:06AM (#1244695)

    Because while it's impressive that we manage to build gates that switch in femtoseconds, we should keep in mind that the speed of light limits just how far that information that gate switched can travel in that femtosecond. Unless I miscalculated something, the distance is merely 300 nanometers. Since the other side now also needs time to register the impulse and react to it... don't get me wrong, we will likely see a considerable increase of speed due to it (provided we can somehow get it cooled, and miniaturized enough and all), but I highly doubt that we'll even get close to the petahertz they propose here.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 13 2022, @02:49PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 13 2022, @02:49PM (#1244744) Journal

      Even if we could get 10 GHz or twenty would be a big improvement, yet still far from hurting any pets.

      --
      To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
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