Even if you lived to be 200 years old, you would experience far fewer than 90 billion seconds in your entire lifetime. A new ultrafast light source flips on and off at the incomprehensibly quick rate of 90 billion times every single second.
This extreme speed serves a purpose beyond simply setting a new record — it could enable computers to run even faster than they are able to today. The device, described in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, is a step toward creating a completely new, faster kind of computer that operates using particles that transmit light instead of the particles that transmit electricity.
"This is something that the scientific community has wanted to do for a long time," senior study author Maiken Mikkelsen of Duke University said in a statement. "We can now start to think about making fast-switching devices based on this research, so there's a lot of excitement about this demonstration."
Known as an optical computer, this faster type of computer requires a light source that can be switched on and off extremely quickly. Lasers are speedy enough, but their high energy requirements make them an impractical choice.
The new light sources shown above use a technique known as plasmonics to achieve these high speeds. This involves shining a laser on the surface of a tiny silver cube just tens of nanometers to a side, spurring a reaction with even tinier "quantum dots" made of a semiconducting material. The quantum dots ultimately emit the light carriers, known as photons, that the computer would use to process and transmit data.
Solving the light source problem is key, but scientists have many more challenges to overcome before optical computers can become a reality. Still, the researchers responsible for this advance are hopeful.
"The eventual goal is to integrate our technology into a device that can be excited either optically or electrically," lead author Thang Hoang said in a statement. "That's something that I think everyone, including funding agencies, is pushing pretty hard for."
Photo: Doom64 | Flickr
