A device for revolutionary Internet acceleration has been created

An all-optical switch eliminates the bottlenecks of fiber optic communication.

Conversion of data transmitted by optical fiber into electrical signals – the bottleneck of modern telecommunications, in particular the trunk channels of the Internet. The University of Michigan created an all-optical switch that solved this problem. Its authors told about the invention in Nature Communications.

The device works like an ordinary logic gate – elementary element of computer technology. It can be in the on or off state, or perform an exclusive OR function, going to the zero state when units are applied to both inputs, and it is controlled by a laser beam – passing or blocking circularly polarized light.

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"The all-optical switch is the first step towards all-optical computing or the construction of optical neural networks", – says the lead author of the study, graduate student Linxiao Zhou.

At the heart of the valve – optical resonator, the cavity of which is covered with a layer of tungsten diselenide WSe2 one molecule thick. After hitting a semiconductor, a laser amplified by several mirrors changes its band gap, that is, the amount of energy required for an electron to enter the next orbital, or the energy emitted during its descent to a lower orbital – a phenomenon known as the Stark effect. As a result – the density of the light flux through the switch is modulated.

In addition, in the experiments, the optical Stark effect created a pseudomagnetic field (that is, one that acts only at the quantum level, – spins electrons) of a dizzying magnitude of 210 tesla (for comparison: the force the most powerful magnet – 100 T). Therefore, development has not only applied, but also fundamental scientific significance.