Optical Transistor Made From Single Molecule

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/2c512b39eca5.jpg[/atsimg]

Researchers from ETH Zurich have recently managed to create an optical transistor from a single molecule in what is yet another important achievement on the road to quantum computing. The molecule itself is about 2 nanometers in size, much smaller than standard transistors, which means that a lot more could be integrated in a single chip. Dr. Hwang, lead author of the academic paper, said, 'Our single-molecule optical transistor generates almost negligible amount of heat.

When a single molecule absorbs one photon, there is some probability (quantum yield) that the molecule emits a photon out. The rest of the energy absorbed turns into heat in the matrix. For the case of the specific hydrocarbon molecule that we use, the quantum yield is near 100%. So almost no heat is generated.'

www.gizmag.com...

Almost no heat generated means smaller heat-sinks (if one is even required). Down the road we can look forward to embedded nano-scale wearable devices of all kinds.

IMHO, this is exciting stuff.

Wow that's cool.
This got me thinking how would one go about building an optical capacitor though? I don't think light can be trapped for a span of time can it?
Well if the basics like optical transistors are todays news then soon enough we may have the optronics (hehe I just made up that word ) to build simple oscillators and amplifiers which is the building blocks of bigger circuits.
The only problem I see here is the need to interface these new ideas to the old. How exactly would one interface the real world to these new parts? Doing so would cause more complications than just using something more simple to get the job done.
I do see a strong future for these technologies in the computing world, like what will be needed for future CPUs.

Originally posted by darklife
Wow that's cool.
This got me thinking how would one go about building an optical capacitor though? I don't think light can be trapped for a span of time can it?
Well if the basics like optical transistors are todays news then soon enough we may have the optronics (hehe I just made up that word

) to build simple oscillators and amplifiers which is the building blocks of bigger circuits.
The only problem I see here is the need to interface these new ideas to the old. How exactly would one interface the real world to these new parts? Doing so would cause more complications than just using something more simple to get the job done.
I do see a strong future for these technologies in the computing world, like what will be needed for future CPUs.

Light can slowed down dramatically in superfluids.

Originally posted by darklife
Wow that's cool.
This got me thinking how would one go about building an optical capacitor though? I don't think light can be trapped for a span of time can it?
Well if the basics like optical transistors are todays news then soon enough we may have the optronics (hehe I just made up that word

) to build simple oscillators and amplifiers which is the building blocks of bigger circuits.
The only problem I see here is the need to interface these new ideas to the old. How exactly would one interface the real world to these new parts? Doing so would cause more complications than just using something more simple to get the job done.
I do see a strong future for these technologies in the computing world, like what will be needed for future CPUs.

Harvard Stopped light...

Researchers now able to stop, restart light

"Two years ago we slowed it down to 38 miles an hour; now we've been able to park it then bring it back up to full speed." Lene Hau isn't talking about a used motorbike, but about light – that ethereal, life-sustaining stuff that normally travels 93 million miles from the sun in about eight minutes.

Less than five years ago, the speed of light was considered one of the universe's great constants. Albert Einstein theorized that light cannot travel faster than 186,282 miles per second. No one has proved him wrong, but he never said that it couldn't go slower.

Hau, 41, a professor of physics at Harvard, admits that the famous genius would "probably be stunned" at the results of her experiments. Working at the Rowland Institute for Science, overlooking the Charles River and the gold dome of the state Capitol in Boston, she and her colleagues slowed light 20 million-fold in 1999, to an incredible 38 miles an hour. They did it by passing a beam of light through a small cloud of atoms cooled to temperatures a billion times colder than those in the spaces between stars. The atom cloud was suspended magnetically in a chamber pumped down to a vacuum 100 trillion times lower than the pressure of air in the room where you are reading this.

"It's nifty to look into the chamber and see a clump of ultracold atoms floating there," Hau says. "In this odd state, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it."

Source - Harvard Gazette

reply to post by DaMod


Yes, I also noticed the effect is very similar to 'light slowing' effect in BEC particles.

Anyway, to make it clear above the hype and all that. Light isn't actually slowed or stopped, it's only intentionally delayed by transferring the photon's quantum state to the matter(BEC). A BEC could hold that quantum state indefinitely making it appear light has slowed or stopped(when in reality, the light's properties has been transferred in the BEC, it simply 'disappeared' in a sense). And by another manipulation by lasers, the BEC releases that quantum state and it becomes photon again. Light in its 'free state' never actually gone below the absolute speed of light.

[edit on 7-7-2009 by ahnggk]