Scientists have found a way to increase the speed of electronics in millions of times

A group of researchers showed how, using pulses of light, electron transfer can be accelerated, and thus was able to switch electron currents at a speed of about 600 attoseconds (10-18).

Components of modern electronics, usuallybased on semiconductor technologies, able to turn on or off in picoseconds (10-12). At the same time, ordinary mobile phones and computers operate at maximum frequencies of several gigahertz, and only individual transistors can approach terahertz indicators. Further increasing the speed of oscillations is a difficult task.

However, scientists from the Universities of Constance,Paris-South, Luxembourg, the Center for Physics of Materials and the International Physics Center Donostia have developed an experimental setup for manipulating the movement of electrons using ultrashort light pulses.

It consisted of nanoscale gold antennas andultrafast laser emitting 100 million single-cycle light pulses per second to generate a measured current. An optical antenna in the form of a butterfly recorded a sub-wave and sub-cyclic spatio-temporal concentration of the electric field of the pulse in a gap of 6 nm wide.

As a result of nonlinear tunnelingof electrons from a metal and acceleration in the gap of an optical field, researchers were able to switch electron currents at a speed of about 600 atoseconds. This process occurs on a time scale of less than half the period of oscillation of the light pulse.

According to scientists, in the distant future, this technology will allow the creation of electronics that work at the speed of light.

Earlier, we also reported on the development of a model of a quantum battery that can work without energy loss.