{"id":129901,"date":"2021-11-02T20:24:37","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T03:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/new-optical-switch-is-up-to-1000-times-faster-than-silicon-transistors"},"modified":"2021-11-02T20:24:37","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T03:24:37","slug":"new-optical-switch-is-up-to-1000-times-faster-than-silicon-transistors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/new-optical-switch-is-up-to-1000-times-faster-than-silicon-transistors","title":{"rendered":"New Optical Switch Is Up to 1,000 Times Faster Than Silicon Transistors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-optical-switch-is-up-to-1000-times-faster-than-silicon-transistors2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It consists of a 35-nanometer-wide film made out of an organic semiconductor sandwiched between two mirrors that create a microcavity, which keeps light trapped inside. When a bright \u201cpump\u201d laser is shone onto the device, photons from its beam couple with the material to create a conglomeration of quasiparticles known as a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/54667-bose-einstein-condensate.html\">Bose-Einstein condensate<\/a>, a collection of particles that behaves like a single atom.<\/p>\n<p>A second weaker laser can be used to switch the condensate between two levels with different numbers of quasiparticles. The level with more particles represents the \u201con\u201d state of a transistor, while the one with fewer represents the \u201coff\u201d state.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s most promising about the new device, described in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-021-03866-9\">paper in <em>Nature<\/em><\/a><em>,<\/em> is that it can be switched between its two states a trillion times a second, which is somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today\u2019s leading commercial transistors. It can also be switched by just a single photon, which means it requires far less energy to drive than a transistor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It consists of a 35-nanometer-wide film made out of an organic semiconductor sandwiched between two mirrors that create a microcavity, which keeps light trapped inside. When a bright \u201cpump\u201d laser is shone onto the device, photons from its beam couple with the material to create a conglomeration of quasiparticles known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}