Photonics & optoelectronics
*”Graphene Printing Technique ‘Silk Screens’ Flexible Electronics” for IEEE Spectrum online, Oct. 18, 2018. Graphene-based remote epitaxy enables inexpensive copying of gallium arsenide and gallium nitride chips
* "Forever Data in Quartz: The Quest for the Immortal Bit," a story for IEEE Spectrum on Feb. 25, 2016 about the ultimate data backup medium--an optical storage tech that lasts billions of years and withstands fire and heat up to 1000 degrees C.
* Plasmonic biosensor developed for bloodless glucose sampling in diabetes patients. For IEEE Spectrum on June 5, 2014.
* "Photonics Trick Finesses Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle – Experiment bolsters Bohmian mechanics, an alternative to quantum mechanics theory, and tests possible new tools for semiconductor physics" -- an article for IEEE Spectrum on June 2, 2011
* "Optics and Electronics Elope," a story for Wired.com on Jan. 22, 2007
"If you look out in the middle of the next decade, when (processors will contain) hundreds of cores, you're looking at terabits of (on-chip) communication right there," said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's Photonics Technology Group. "That's very difficult to do with copper."
That's when, maybe 15 or 20 years out, electrons will nearly exclusively be the stuff that computes, while photons will nearly exclusively be the stuff that communicates.
And ideally, it'll still all be done on good, old-fashioned silicon chips -- so computer manufacturers won't have to waste the billions of dollars invested in facilities building conventional computer chips, called complementary metal-oxide semiconductors, or CMOS.
* "Photons Flout the Light Speed Limit," an article for New Scientist magazine on Aug. 17, 2007 (paywall)
"It's a speed record that is supposed to be impossible to break. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have propelled photons faster than the speed of light. This would be in direct violation of a key tenet of Einstein's special theory of relativity that states that nothing, under any circumstance, can exceed the speed of light.
Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz, Germany, have been exploring a phenomenon in quantum optics called photon tunnelling, which occurs when a particle slips across an apparently uncrossable barrier. The pair say they have now tunnelled photons "instantaneously" across a barrier of various sizes, from a few millimetres up to a metre. Their conclusion is that the photons traverse the barrier much faster than the speed of light."
(cc) image here
