Posted on 12/17/2018 2:30:13 PM PST by ETL
Scientists have long known that synthetic materials—called metamaterials—can manipulate electromagnetic waves such as visible light to make them behave in ways that cannot be found in nature. That has led to breakthroughs such as super-high resolution imaging. Now, UMass Lowell is part of a research team that is taking the technology of manipulating light in a new direction.
The team—which includes collaborators from UMass Lowell, King's College London, Paris Diderot University and the University of Hartford -has created a new class of metamaterial that can be "tuned" to change the color of light.
This technology could someday enable on-chip optical communication in computer processors, leading to smaller, faster, cheaper and more power-efficient computer chips with wider bandwidth and better data storage, among other improvements. On-chip optical communication can also create more efficient fiber-optic telecommunication networks.
"Today's computer chips use electrons for computing. Electrons are good because they're tiny," said Prof. Viktor Podolskiy of the Department of Physics and Applied Physics, who is the project's principal investigator at UMass Lowell.
"However, the frequency of electrons is not fast enough. Light is a combination of tiny particles, called photons, which don't have mass. As a result, photons could potentially increase the chip's processing speed."
By converting electrical signals into pulses of light, on-chip communication will replace obsolete copper wires found on conventional silicon chips, Podolskiy explained. This will enable chip-to-chip optical communication and, ultimately, core-to-core communication on the same chip.
"The end result would be the removal of the communication bottleneck, making parallel computing go so much faster," he said, adding that the energy of photons determines the color of light.
"The vast majority of everyday objects, including mirrors, lenses and optical fibers, can steer or absorb these photons.
However, some materials can combine several photons together, resulting in a new photon of higher energy and of different color."
Podolskiy says enabling the interaction of photons is key to information processing and optical computing. "Unfortunately, this nonlinear process is extremely inefficient and suitable materials for promoting the photon interaction are very rare."
Podolskiy and the research team have discovered that several materials with poor nonlinear characteristics can be combined together, resulting in a new metamaterial that exhibits desired state-of-the-art nonlinear properties.
"The enhancement comes from the way the metamaterial reshapes the flow of photons," he said.
"The work opens a new direction in controlling the nonlinear response of materials and may find applications in on-chip optical circuits, drastically improving on-chip communications."
Explore further: New ultrathin optic cavities allow simultaneous color production on an electronic chip
More information: Brian Wells et al, Structural second-order nonlinearity in plasmonic metamaterials, Optica (2018). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.5.001502
Journal reference: Optica 
Provided by: University of Massachusetts Lowell
Looks like a ELO concert.
ELO had quite a sound stage back in the day.
And, in relation to the article, ELO probably had quite a light stage back in the day as well.
They have discovered glass?.....................
Everything nowadays is a smaller, faster, colder, more complex version of something already predicted to exist last century. We need more Einsteins, Von Neumans, Heavisides etc to kick applied technology in the pants, throw in a whole new paradigm, and open up truly new frontiers other than an atom-sized transistor
Always wanted to see them............never were around where I was.................
Not only that but ELO had quite the back stage as well.
Jeff Lynne is a beast.
IMHO, One of the Top Five Greatest Albums of ALL time!..................
*ping*
Einstein’s three miracle papers of 1905 depended on the idea that photons and electrons were particles, which was a heresy within German physics at the time.
It’s a good thing that he was a patent clerk instead of a physicist and that his reasoning was rock solid and backed by experimental results.
One more cool thing - the light paths can be denser because they can cross the same space without interfering with each other.
Photoelectric Effect.
Also see Compton Effect.
“Today’s computer chips use electrons for computing. Electrons are good because they’re tiny,”
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