For the first time, a team of scientists has managed to store information based on light waves as sound waves inside a computer microchip . Researchers at the University of Sydney (Australia) who have carried out this research, published in Nature Communications , are confident that this finding will contribute to the evolution of current computers – which are based on electronics; that is, in electrons – to others based on light – in photons – a technology that will be fundamental for the future of computing, since it will allow computers to be much faster.
These photonic computers should run about twenty times faster than any of our laptops . And, in addition, they would not generate heat or absorb energy, something that does happen with the electronic devices that we have today. The difference is that computers today use processors that use electrons to transmit data; and, instead of those electrons, in the new computers the data would be processed in the form of photons – these can transmit, manipulate and store information in a much more efficient way than electrons.
The difficult thing is not to achieve the encoding of information in photons – it is something we already do when sending information through the optical fiber – but to find a way that a computer microchip is capable of recovering and processing information stored in photons, since light travels too fast. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the devices we have today to fit the transmission of information through light .
“Like the difference between thunder and lightning”
The solution, according to Moritz Merklein, Birgit Stiller and Benjamin Eggleton, responsible for this Australian research, is to reduce the speed at which information in the form of light moves and convert it into sound waves. “The information in our microchip in its acoustic form travels at a speed of five orders of magnitude slower than in the optical form” , explains Stiller, supervisor of the project. “It’s like the difference between thunder and lightning,” he adds.
That implies that computers could have the benefits of handling data supplied at high speed, such as the absence of the heat that causes electronic resistance and that of the interference of electromagnetic radiation .
“For light-based computers to become a commercial reality, the photonic data on the chip needs to be slowed down so that it can be processed, routed, stored and accessible, ” explained Moritz Merklein.
The team of Australian scientists achieved their goal by developing a memory system for digital information that is capable of accurately transferring light and sound waves into a photonic microchip they built for it. “This is an important step in the field of optical information processing, as this concept meets all the requirements for current and future generation optical communication systems,” said Benjamin Eggleton.
Also, and unlike what had happened in previous attempts, the new system was able to work in a wide bandwidth . “Our system is not limited to a small bandwidth, but allows you to store and retrieve multiple wavelengths simultaneously, increasing the efficiency of a device,” concludes Merklein.
