Researchers from Russia and Switzerland have developed an energy efficient optical switch that does not require cooling, which up to a thousand times faster than modern commercial electronic transistors. The article of researchers was published in the Nature magazine.
In the Skolkovsky Institute of Technology Science and IBM Research Center in Zurich, two lasers are used – weaker controlling or turning off a brighter pumping laser. Switching between levels occurs inside the microesonator – organic polymer thickness of 35 nanometers. When the pump laser is brighter from two – shines on the switch, thousands of identical quasiparticles are created in the same place, forming the so-called condensate Bose – Einstein, 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,” the first author of the study, Senior Researcher, Laboratory of Hybrid Photonico Skolteha Anton Students. In addition, scientists were able to additionally reduce the power consumption of the device with a number of techniques to further reduce the power consumption of the device. In particular, it was possible to find the optimal wavelength of lasers, as well as minimize the noise from the background radiation of the device by coordinating the control laser and the condensate detection scheme.
In addition, capable of performing trillion operations per second switch can also transmit data between devices and increase the intensity of the input signal to 23 thousand times.