Controlled charge flows are vital to many science fields since they carry energy and information. They serve as probes of material properties and dynamics and are also used in revealing and inducing broken symmetries.
Conventional microelectronics architectures, composed of transistors to control electrical currents along wires, power many devices, from advanced computers to simple gadgets. However, integrated circuits offer diminishing returns in terms of speed and adaptability.
Emerging technologies for light-based current control provide promising routes beyond the limitations of conventional systems. However, experts still face the challenge of maintaining optical generation and manipulating currents at nanometer spatial scales. This has been a vital step towards scalable optoelectronic systems for microelectronics and information science.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, researchers developed nanometer-scale light-based systems. Their innovation can deliver breakthroughs in various technological applications, such as room-temperature infrared detection and ultrafast microelectronics. The result of their experiment is discussed in the paper "Light-driven nanoscale vectorial currents."
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