Researchers from Russia and Switzerland have developed an energy-efficient optical switch that does not require cooling, which is up to a thousand times faster than modern commercial electronic transistors.
The researchers ' article was published in the journal Nature.
The device created by specialists from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and the IBM Research Center in Zurich uses two lasers — a weaker control turns on or off a brighter pump laser. Switching between levels takes place inside a microresonator — an organic polymer with a thickness of 35 nanometers. When the pump laser — the brighter of the two — shines on the switch, thousands of identical quasiparticles are created in the same place, forming a so — called Bose-Einstein condensate, which encodes the logical states of the device. A larger number of particles corresponds to one.
"The new device is extremely energy — efficient due to the fact that only a few photons are required to switch it," said Anton Sitatelev, the first author of the study, a senior researcher at the Skoltech hybrid Photonics laboratory. In addition, the scientists managed to use a number of techniques to further reduce the energy consumption of the device operating at room temperature. In particular, it was possible to find the optimal wavelength of the lasers, as well as to minimize the noise from the background radiation of the device by matching the control laser and the condensate detection scheme.
In addition, the switch, capable of performing a trillion operations per second, can also transfer data between devices and increase the intensity of the input signal up to 23 thousand times.
