This is done, for example, by illuminating tiny graphene-based wires connecting two gold metals. In recent years, scientists have learned how to exploit laser pulses that last a few femtoseconds to generate ultrafast bursts of electrical currents. Lasers generate ultrafast bursts of electricity “This is a great example of how fundamental science can lead to new technologies,” says Ignacio Franco, an associate professor of chemistry and physics at Rochester who, in collaboration with doctoral student Antonio José Garzón-Ramírez ’21 (PhD), performed the theoretical studies that lead to this discovery. That is almost a million times faster than today’s computers operating with gigahertz clock rates, where 1 petahertz is 1 million gigahertz. The researchers’ advances have opened the door to information processing at the petahertz limit, where one quadrillion computational operations can be processed per second. The feat, reported in the journal Nature, was accomplished by harnessing and independently controlling, for the first time, the real and virtual charge carriers that compose these ultrafast bursts of electricity. Now, researchers at the University of Rochester and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have made a decisive step in this direction by demonstrating a logic gate-the building block of computation and information processing-that operates at femtosecond timescales. Yet our ability to process information in these ultrafast timescales has remained elusive. Remarkably, lasers currently allow us to generate bursts of electricity on femtosecond timescales-that is, in a millionth of a billionth of a second. (University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw)Ī long-standing quest for science and technology has been to develop electronics and information processing that operate near the fastest timescales allowed by the laws of nature.Ī promising way to achieve this goal involves using laser light to guide the motion of electrons in matter, and then using this control to develop electronic circuit elements-a concept known as lightwave electronics. “We clarified the role of virtual and real charge carriers in laser-induced currents, and that opened the way to the creation of ultrafast logic gates,” says Ignacio Franco, associate professor of chemistry and physics at Rochester. Synchronized laser pulses (red and blue) generate a burst of real and virtual charge carriers in graphene that are absorbed by gold metal to produce a net current.
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