The steady improvement in speed and power of modern electronics may soon hit the brakes unless new ways are found to pack more structures into microscopic spaces. Unfortunately, engineers are already approaching the limit of what light -- the choice tool for "tweezing" tiny features -- can achieve. But there may be a way of reaching beyond this so-called "diffraction limit" by precisely steering, in real time, a curve-shaped beam of weird "virtual particles" known as surface plasmons.
This technique, described in the Optical Society's (OSA) journal Optics Letters, opens the possibility of even smaller, faster communications systems and optoelectronic devices. Examples of optoelectronic devices used today include photodiodes such as solar cells, integrated optical circuits used in communications, and charged coupled imaging devices at the heart of cell phone cameras and receivers on the world's most advanced telescopes. This method also may yield new, important tools for research in chemistry, biology, and medicine.
The key to this innovation is the ability -- for the first time -- to actively manipulate a blended stream of light and plasma, known as a plasmonic Airy beam. The beam, owing to the laws of electromagnetism, travels, not in a straight line like the beams of light to which we are accustomed, but rather in an arc. "It's an odd thing for sure, as light is supposed to travel in a straight line," says Peng Zhang a member of the research team with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center of the University of California, Berkeley and Department of Physics and Astronomy at San Francisco State University (SFSU). "That's why people are so crazy about these kinds of interesting beams."
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