New optical device to enhance computer performance developed

researchers have developed an optical device that may lead to new and more powerful computers that run faster and cooler.

Researchers at Washington University have developed an essential component of these new computers that would run on light.

Lan Yang and his research team has created an optical diode by coupling tiny doughnut shaped optical resonators on a silicon chip, which is capable of completely eliminating light transmission in one direction and greatly enhancing light transmission in the other nonreciprocal light transmission.

The electrical diode prevents electricity from backflow along a wire providing protection to crucial parts of an electronic circuit or processor; an optical diode does the same thing with light.

Yang said that they believe that their discovery will benefit many other fields involving electronics, acoustics, plasmonics and meta-materials and coupling of so-called loss and gain devices using PT (parity-time)-symmetry could enable such advances as cloaking devices, stronger lasers that need less input power.

The researchers said that their resonators are small enough to use in computers and future optical information processors, and their optical diodes is built from silica, which has very little material loss at the telecommunication wavelength.

The study has been published in Nature Physics.