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An optical transistor which has been successfully crafted from a single molecule has brought the researchers a step closer to the optical computer. The optical computer will be much faster and more powerful than existing counterparts.
Existing central processing units (CPUs) limit the performance of computers.This is why scientists have been trying for some time to find ways to produce integrated circuits that operate on the basis of photons instead of electrons. The reason is that photons not only generate much less heat than electrons, but they also enable considerably higher data transfer rates.
Even though a large part of the existing telecom engineering is based on the optical signal transmission, the vital encoding of the information is generated using electronically controlled switches.
Vahid Sandoghdar, professor at the Lab of Physical Chemistry of ETH Zurich, explains that "comparing the current state of this technology with that of electronics, we are somewhat closer to the vacuum tube amplifiers that were around in the fifties than we are to today's integrated circuits".
The research group has now achieved a decisive breakthrough by successfully creating an optical transistor with a single molecule.
These findings have been published in Nature.
