All-optical devices promise higher-frequency processing and faster information transfer, compared to their electronic counterparts. An elementary component of this circuitry is a switch fast enough to deal with optical frequencies. Now, Fei Chen at East China Normal University and his colleagues in China, have developed a room temperature ultrafast optoelectronic switch using a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of polaritons. This device pushes the speed frontier of all-optical controlled polaritonic switches at room temperature towards the terahertz regime.

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