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janrinok [soylentnews.org] writes:

From a report from Vanderbilt Institute for Nanoscale Science and Engineering [vanderbilt.edu] comes news of a breakthrough in miniaturization that could have a major impact on hardware in the future:

An ultra-fast and ultra-small optical switch has been invented that could advance the day when photons replace electrons in the innards of consumer products ranging from cell phones to automobiles.

The new optical device can turn on and off trillions of times per second. It consists of individual switches that are only one five-hundredth the width of a human hair (200 nanometers) in diameter. This size is much smaller than the current generation of optical switches and it easily breaks one of the major technical barriers to the spread of electronic devices that detect and control light: miniaturizing the size of ultrafast optical switches.

The ultrafast switch is made out of an artificial material engineered to have properties that are not found in nature. In this case, the 'metamaterial' consists of nanoscale particles of vanadium dioxide (VO2) — a crystalline solid that can rapidly switch back and forth between an opaque, metallic phase and a transparent, semiconducting phase — which are deposited on a glass substrate and coated with a 'nanomesh' of tiny gold nanoparticles.

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