Photonics

MIT spin off company Ayar Labs is combining electrons and light in new optoelectronic chips to speed up data transmission and reduce energy consumption in chip-to-chip communications by 95 percent.

There are plenty of strange phenomena in the universe, and fast radio bursts are among the more mysterious. So far, we don't know the source of these high-energy light bursts, but Harvard researchers propose they're caused by planet-sized alien transmitters for powering interstellar spacecraft.

Physicists have created a new set of energy-carrying particles dubbed "topological plexcitons" that show promise in greatly enhancing energy flows for solar cells and nanoscale photonic circuitry.

An international team of researchers has found a way to create microscopically-small lasers directly from silicon, unlocking the possibilities of direct integration of photonics on silicon, and a significant step towards light-based computers.

A team of physicists at TUM are working on nanowire lasers that are a thousand times thinner than a human hair and may one day lead to economical, high-performance photonic circuits.​

NASA is working to develop the next generation of high-speed modems using an emerging technology called integrated photonics. ​

A team from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created a 2D laser just one molecule thick that promises to make significant advances in ultra-compact photonic components for the likes of quantum computers and the next generation of optoelectronic devices.

Researchers from the University of Bristol and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone claim to have developed a fully-programmable quantum optical chip able to encode and manipulate photons in an infinite number of ways. This breakthrough may pave the way for true quantum optical computing systems.

Using newly-developed metamaterials, scientists at the University of Buffalo have created a prototype "hyperlens" that may help image objects in visible light with dimensions so small that they were once only clearly viewable through electron microscopes.

Photonic CPUs could potentially process information at the speed of light – millions of times faster than standard computers available today. University of Utah engineers have moved that possibility one step closer with the claimed creation of the world's smallest silicon photonics beamsplitter

Researchers have created a prototype optical antenna that is claimed to increase the intensity of emission from a nanorod light source by more than 115 times. This technique may offer the opportunity to replace power-hungry lasers with LEDs in short-range optical communications devices.

The city of Vienna has hosted a laser light show with a twist with University of Vienna scientists having tested a new way of sending data over a light beam. The technique, which exploits classical and quantum mechanics, allows much more information to be transmitted securely through the air.