{"id":141277,"date":"2022-06-28T07:03:54","date_gmt":"2022-06-28T12:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/logic-gate-breaks-speed-record"},"modified":"2022-06-28T07:03:54","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T12:03:54","slug":"logic-gate-breaks-speed-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/logic-gate-breaks-speed-record","title":{"rendered":"Logic gate breaks speed record"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The first logic gate to operate at femtosecond timescales could help usher in an era of information processing at petahertz frequencies \u2013 a million times faster than today\u2019s gigahertz-scale computers. The new gate, developed by researchers at the University of Rochester in the US and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universit\u00e4t Erlangen-N\u00fcrnberg (FAU) in Germany, is an application of lightwave electronics \u2013 essentially, shuffling electrons around with light fields \u2013 and harnesses both real and virtual charge carriers.<\/p>\n

In lightwave electronics, scientists use laser light to guide the motion of electrons in matter, then exploit this control to create electronic circuit elements. \u201cSince light oscillates so fast (roughly a few hundred million times per second), using light could speed up electronics by a factor of roughly 10 000 as compared to computer chips,\u201d says Tobias Boolakee<\/a>, a laser physicist in Peter Hommelhoff<\/a>\u2019s group at the FAU and the first author of a study in Nature<\/em><\/a> on the new gate. \u201cWith our present work, we have been able propose the idea for a first light field-driven logic gate (the fundamental building block for any computer architecture) and also demonstrate its working principle experimentally.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the work, Boolakee and colleagues prepared tiny graphene-based wires connected to two gold electrodes and illuminated them with a laser pulse lasting a few tens of femtoseconds (10-15 <\/sup>s). This laser pulse excites, or sets in motion, the electrons in graphene and causes them to propagate in a particular direction \u2013 so generating a net electrical current.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first logic gate to operate at femtosecond timescales could help usher in an era of information processing at petahertz frequencies \u2013 a million times faster than today\u2019s gigahertz-scale computers. The new gate, developed by researchers at the University of Rochester in the US and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universit\u00e4t Erlangen-N\u00fcrnberg (FAU) in Germany, is an application of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141277","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\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}