Nanoscale Terahertz Optical Switch Breaks Miniaturization Barrier

Science_afficionado writes "There is a general consensus that ultimately photons will replace electrons running through wires in most of our microelectronic devices. One of the current technical barriers to the spread of optoelectronics has been the difficulty in miniaturizing the ultrafast optical switches required. Now a team of physicists at Vanderbilt has made terahertz optical switches out of nanoparticles of vanadium dioxide, a material long known for its ability to rapidly change phase between metallic to semiconducting states (abstract). They report in the Mar. 12 issue of Nano Letters that they have created individually addressable switches that are 200 nm in diameter and can switch between transparent and opaque states at terahertz rates."

Comments

Isolation, Reflection and Cross-talk

[Anonymous Coward]

There doesn't seem to be any mention of these. AFAIK these are important characteristics. If the switch has poor isolation, it's not a very good switch. If it reflects too much, it will cause havoc in the system. At the nano scale all of these properties become more and more significant.

Re:Isolation, Reflection and Cross-talk

[Zero__Kelvin]

It works, so presumably they did address those issues ;-)

Also, photons don't have cross-talk. That is a specifically electro-magnetic phenomenon.

First sentence of summary is false.

[smaddox]

Integrated photonics has its place, but it's never going to replace CMOS for computing. Waveguides don't scale like transistors do. If you want to see what integrated photonics is good for, look no further than Infinera. They build photonic integrated circuits for fiber optics communications in 10 years they will own the market for long distance endpoint hardware.