{"id":22059,"date":"2016-02-13T02:48:31","date_gmt":"2016-02-13T10:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/new-graphene-lens-could-help-computers-beam-data-at-the-speed-of-light"},"modified":"2017-04-24T22:25:44","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T05:25:44","slug":"new-graphene-lens-could-help-computers-beam-data-at-the-speed-of-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/new-graphene-lens-could-help-computers-beam-data-at-the-speed-of-light","title":{"rendered":"New graphene lens could help computers beam data at the speed of light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-graphene-lens-could-help-computers-beam-data-at-the-speed-of-light.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers have used graphene to create a lens that\u2019s so flat, it\u2019s 300 times thinner than a sheet of paper and weighs just 1 microgram. That means it\u2019s small enough to split a beam of single photons \u2014 something that\u2019s going to be crucial if we ever want to develop <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Optical_computing\">optical computers that process data at the speed of light.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>These optical computers require devices called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Photonic_chip\">photonic chips<\/a>, which store information as photons rather than electrons, and allow that information to move at light speed \u2014 and people are pretty excited about it. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/nasa-s-new-photonics-modem-will-help-lasers-carry-data-at-up-to-100-times-faster-than-today-s-radio-signals\">NASA is already using it<\/a>, and the technology is getting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/new-light-based-memory-chip-is-the-first-ever-to-permanently-store-data\">more and more impressive.<\/a> But there are still some limitations, and one of those is having lenses thin enough to split beams of light and divert them around the chip.<\/p>\n<p>Attempts to make these lenses in the past have required expensive and impractical materials such as gold, but researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have been working on a solution, and they\u2019ve managed to produce a lens using graphene oxide that\u2019s not only thin enough to overcome the diffraction limit, but is also cheap, strong, flexible, and easy to produce.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/new-graphene-lens-could-help-computers-beam-data-at-the-speed-of-light\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers have used graphene to create a lens that\u2019s so flat, it\u2019s 300 times thinner than a sheet of paper and weighs just 1 microgram. That means it\u2019s small enough to split a beam of single photons \u2014 something that\u2019s going to be crucial if we ever want to develop optical computers that process data [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22059","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\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22059"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51029,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22059\/revisions\/51029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}