An international research team led by Skoltech and IBM has created an extremely energy-efficient optical switch that could replace electronic transistors in a new generation of computers manipulating photons rather than electrons. In addition to direct power saving, the switch requires no cooling and is really fast: At 1 trillion operations per second, it is between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today's top-notch commercial transistors. The study comes out Wednesday in Nature.
"What makes the new device so energy-efficient is that it only takes a few photons to switch," the first author of the study, Dr. Anton Zasedatelev commented. "In fact, in our Skoltech labs we achieved switching with just one photon at room temperature. That said, there is a long way to go before such proof-of-principle demonstration is utilized in an all-optical co-processor," added Professor Pavlos Lagoudakis, who heads the Hybrid Photonics Labs at Skoltech.
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