Leading research teams in nanophotonics are creating optical transistors, which will be crucial parts of upcoming optical computers. Instead of using electrons to process information, these photonic devices use light to produce less heat and operate more quickly.
For microelectronics engineers, the poor photon-to-photon interaction poses a significant challenge. Scientists developed a planar system to solve this issue where photons couple to other particles and communicate. Future optical transistors could be created using the concept proved in their experiment.
When an electronic device completes a task, it tends to heat up, meaning that some energy is wasted as heat and not used for the job at hand. Devices have cooing components to regulate heating, wasting even more energy. The processing speed of electronic gadgets is constrained. Using light instead of electrons can help with some of these problems. Devices that encode information with light would use less energy, generate less heat, and operate more quickly.
As a result, optical computer research is being done by scientists all over the globe. The primary issue, however, is that photons do not interact with one another as electrons do. Therefore, scientists have proposed strategies to “train” photons to communicate with one another.
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