Duke University (Durham, NC) researchers have developed an ultrafast light-emitting plasmonic device that can flip on and off 90 billion times a second and could form the basis of optical computing. While lasers can fit this requirement, they are too energy hungry and unwieldy to integrate into computer chips.
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Although billions of transistors use electrons to flip on and off billions of times per second, microchips that use photons instead of electrons to process and transmit data could allow computers to operate even faster. Duke University researchers are now one step closer to such a light source.
In a new study, a team from the Pratt School of Engineering pushed semiconductor quantum dots to emit light at more than 90 gigahertz (GHz). The study was published in Nature Communications.
"This is something that the scientific community has wanted to do for a long time," said Maiken Mikkelsen, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at Duke. "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."
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