Imagine a home computer operating 1 million times faster than the most expensive hardware on the market. Now imagine that level of computing power as the industry standard. University of Arizona researchers hope to pave the way for that reality using light-based optical computing, a marked improvement from the semiconductor-based transistors that currently run the world.
University of Arizona Assistant Professor of Physics and Optical Sciences Mohammed Hassan. Credit: Mohammed Hassan "Semiconductor-based transistors are in all of the electronics that we use today," said Mohammed Hassan, assistant professor of physics and optical sciences. "They're part of every industry—from kids' toys to rockets—and are the main building blocks of electronics." Hassan lad an international team of researchers that published the research article "Ultrafast optical switching and data encoding on synthesized light fields" in Science Advances in February. UArizona physics postdoctoral research associate Dandan Hui and physics graduate student Husain Alqattan also contributed to the article, in addition to researchers from Ohio State University and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Semiconductors in electronics rely on electrical signals transmitted via microwaves to switch—either allow or prevent—the flow of electricity and data, represented as either "on" or "off." Hassan said the future of electronics will be based instead on using laser light to control electrical signals, opening the door for the establishment of "optical transistors" and the development of ultrafast…