Graphene has been used to convert gigahertz-frequency electronic signals into high-harmonic, terahertz-frequency signals with extremely high efficiency. The work exploited the nonlinear properties of graphene to achieve terahertz conversion and was done by researchers in Germany at the Helmholtz Centre Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research.
Most electronic devices we use today exploit the semiconducting properties of silicon-based materials to create high-frequency signals to maximize processing speeds. Calculations have suggested that graphene – a sheet of carbon just one atom thick –could be much better suited to this task. Indeed, theoretical studies suggest that graphene could deliver signals at frequencies thousands of times higher than those created by silicon. The predicted response arises from the highly efficient nonlinear interaction between light and matter which takes place in graphene, due to its unique electronic band structure. However, no previous studies had yet achieved this conversion in the lab.
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