Computer processing may be about to get a lot faster thanks to graphene and light. New research out of MIT documents the relationship between hyper-thin carbon structures and light and suggests that the former might allow for the latter to replace electricity in a computer. Though no one is editing Word documents at light speed in a Cambridge lab yet, the researchers say that they have reason to believe this has been an observable phenomena for some time now.
“There are a few experiments that are done with graphene that are very interesting in what they show, but they haven’t been fully explained,” says Ido Kaminer, a physics postdoc at MIT and lead researcher on the paper. “One possible reason that they might actually have this effect with shockwaves of light, and they just don’t know it.”
The discovery is the combination of two unusual properties of graphene. The first is that light moves very slowly in graphene. Although graphene is too thin for light to stay inside it, light is trapped as beams of plasma that hang along both sides of the crystal. Graphene’s other unusual property is that electrons move very quickly within its honeycomb matrix.
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