Future of Electronics: New Material Lets Light Travel “Infinitely Fast” On Chips

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SEAS researchers has developed a new metamaterial that seems to possess a zero refractive index that can allow a phase of light to travel at speeds that are infinitely fast.

As we dawn a new era of technology standards, we are looking at soon replacing our silicon parts in the archive section as the world can expect to soon embrace light. With comparably fast photons are being set to replace our currently electrons. polimero-luce-velocita-fase-1024x656

For years now, scientists have known that we would have to stop extrapolation of the common Moore’s Law and start our search for better perspectives. And recently the scientists at SEAS has finally performed that same concept. We are now looking at two major break trough’s in our technology field and one of them has been around for a few years.

Our first newest concept is Quantum Computation. Quantum computers are nothing like our expectations in regular computers, not even on supercomputers. In fact, the “Top Supercomputer” that uses extensive parallelism completed with the usage of numerous processing units in order to achieve its super-fast speeds, the new quantum computer works with the actual physics of quantum at the core.
And our second newest concept is a light based computation.

A team of researchers attending Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has actually managed to not only design, but develop and manipulate light straight down to the nanoscale. Then they were able to integrate that new technology and place it into the extant devices. Taking this to the next level, the researchers then designed an on-chip metamaterial that possess a zero refractive index so that a phase of the light will now be able to travel with infinitely fast speeds.

There has been no rule of physics that has been broken, yet! However, the researchers have merely worked on the increasing of the phase velocity of light. Meaning the speed by which the crests of light waves travel in a medium. We can see this change in the phase velocity is the reasoning of slowing down the light in other materials and ultimately is the clause of the phenomenon of refraction.

Eric Mazur, which is one of the researchers from the team states;
“Light doesn’t typically like to be squeezed or manipulated, but this metamaterial permits you to manipulate light from one chip to another, to squeeze, bend, twist and reduce the diameter of a beam from the macroscale to the nanoscale. It’s a remarkable new way to manipulate light.”

The new material the scientists have created actually allows the light to maintain a constant phase with all crests and troughs stretched at infinitely long wavelengths. Thus making it possible to manipulate light by stretching and even twisting the light spectrum at the zero expenses of the light’s energy.

The material is consisted of silicon pillar arrays that are directly embedded inside of a polymer matrix that is cladded with a gold film. This new metamaterial makes the interface with photonic chips possible as it is coupled with the silicon waveguides.


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7 COMMENTS

  1. Ok so it says herein that light can be changed by this new material to infinitely long wavelengths. Which in my understanding of electrical engineering means that it can be changed to such wavelengths as ulf and vlf as well as mediumwave and HF frequencies which are definitely longer.

    If this is true then light can be converted to wavelengths that can be more easily converted to electrical energy lets say, than straight out PV solar can do. Lets say further that light can have its wavelengths stretched to equate to 60 Hz which means that we can drive 60 Hz energy into our electronics.

    Maybe this idea at the moment is a bit of a stretch, but this article needs to be checked for accuracy and then if this is true the following assumptions I am making here needs to be investigated in terms of a means to provide a new form of solar energy. In terms of a misdefinition if the definition above is truly that of being able to infinitely stretch the wavelengths of light then this applies, otherwise there is a misdefinition that leads to an errant assumption.

    Of course this article is about chips ~ I am thinking a bit outside the box on this one.

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