New Nanophotonic Waveguides developed at MIT 23
SimilarityEngine writes "Physicists at MIT have developed a new kind of nanophotonic waveguide, overcoming 'several long-standing obstacles'
to move us one step closer to optical computers.
Photonics strives to improve on electronics in terms of
space requirements, speed and energy consumption - but until recently,
it was not possible to perform well in all three areas simultaneously. In their paper, John Joannopoulos et al. demonstrate how to reliably encode a signal as surface plasmons which
side-steps such limitations."
eep (Score:1, Funny)
A story that absolutely noone wants to comment on.
Re:eep (Score:1, Funny)
Re:eep (Score:2, Interesting)
Just goes to show what kind of "nerds" we have populating the site these days...
Time was when you could toss a story like this out there and the readers would understand and be able to discuss it...
Re:eep (Score:1)
Re:eep (Score:2, Funny)
Well this discussion needs to be livened up. (Score:2)
MIT (Score:3, Informative)
The cool signifigance of this (Score:3, Informative)
So pretty much this means that optic technology has made a nice stride in catching up to classic electronic technology. But we wont be seeing the Pentuim-Optic and day soon.
Storm
Nanophotonic waveguides? (Score:5, Funny)
Come on admit it, you took this phrase from an episode of Star Trek, didn't you?
Plasma conduits, intertial dampers, blah blah blah. You aren't fooling anybody.
Re:Nanophotonic waveguides? (Score:1)
Can somebody please clear this up? (Score:1)
A surface plasmon-polariton is formed from the interaction of a photon and surface plasmon (a sort of electronic vibrational mode of the conductor?). This travels along the metal/insulator waveguide with shorter wavelength than that of the original photon, reducing the size requirement of the device. These surface plasmons travel at a somewhat slower velocity than photons, but faster than electrons (which reduces the energy scale of th
Re:Can somebody please clear this up? (Score:5, Informative)
A common trick to make extremely small solid state devices more broadbanded is to put a number of them close enough together so that they interact a bit.
It's kinda like hooking multiple springs together. Each has its own prefered vibration frequency, but when they're hooked together, the system can vibrate at not only those original frequencies, but also other ones as well.
When you have very large numbers of interacting springs, the ranges of frequencies allowed tend to smear out. This effectively means that the device can handle a whole range of frequencies, not just the original one.
Just as springs have vibrations, these plasmons are vibrations. Just like springs have preferred frequencies to vibrate at, these waveguides have preferred frequencies. You put the waveguides close enough that they interact a bit, and it tends to allow more frequencies. Stack up a whole bunch of the waveguide layers, and you can smear out the response so that it's more broadbanded.
This sort of thing is done in a lot of systems based on vibrations.
(There are more details to it, but that's the general idea, and the best I can do at the moment with a cold making it hard to think.
Neat idea. (Score:2)
In this, the material itself converts the light signal into a vibration in the surface electrons, you have structures set up that process it, then it converts back to light when it's reemitted from the su
Star Trek (Score:1)