This artistic rendering magnifies a electro-optic modulator. Virginia Commonwealth University image/Nathaniel Kinsey
Researchers at the University of Washington, working with researchers from the ETH-Zurich, Purdue University and Virginia Commonwealth University, have achieved an optical communications breakthrough that could revolutionize information technology. They created a tiny device, smaller than a human hair, that translates electrical bits (0s and 1s of the digital language) into light, or photonic bits, at speeds 10s of times faster than current technologies. "As with earlier advances in information technology, this can dramatically impact the way we live," said Larry Dalton , a UW chemistry professor emeritus and leader in photonics research. These new electro-optic devices approach the size of current electronic circuit elements and are important for integrating photonics and electronics on a single chip. The new technology also involves utilization of a particle, a plasmon polariton, that has properties intermediate between electrons and photons. This hybrid particle technology is referred to as plasmonics. "The device has been built as a plasmonic modulator," said Christian Haffner, a graduate student at ETH-Zurich and lead author of the paper.
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