Optical Transistor 10,000 Times Faster Than World's Fastest Electronic Transistor

Dielectric devices hold promise to allow for much faster computing than possible today with semiconductors. Such a device can work at 1 petahertz, while the processor of today’s computer runs slightly faster than at 3 gigahertz.

“Now we can fundamentally have a device that works 10 thousand times faster than a transistor that can run at 100 gigahertz,” Stockman said. “This is a field effect, the same type that controls a transistor. The material becomes conductive as a very high electrical field of light is applied to it, but dielectrics are 10,000 times faster than semiconductors.”

The results were published online Dec. 5 in Nature. The research institutions include the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, the Department of Physics at the Munich Technical University, the Physics Department at Ludwig Maximilian University at Munich and the Fritz Haber Institute at Berlin, Germany.

At one time, scientists thought dielectrics could not be used in signal processing – breaking down when required high electric fields were applied. Instead, Stockman said, it is possible for them to work if such extreme fields are applied at a very short time.

In a second paper also published online Dec. 5 in Nature, Stockman and his fellow researchers experimented with probing optical processes in a dielectric – silica – with very short extreme ultraviolet pulses. They discovered the fastest process that can fundamentally exist in condensed matter physics, unfolding at about at 100 attoseconds – millions of times faster than the blink of an eye.

The scientists were able to show that very short, highly intense light pulses can cause on-off electric currents – necessary in computing to make the 1s and 0s needed in the binary language of computers — in dielectrics, making extremely swift processing possible.
 
Stockman’s work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The first paper, “Optical-field-induced current in dielectrics” is available throughhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11567. The second, “Controlling dielectrics with the electric field of light,” is available through http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11720.

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