Computers may be getting faster every year, but those
advances in computer speed could be dwarfed if their 1’s and 0’s were
represented by bursts of light, instead of electricity.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made an
important advance in this frontier of photonics, fashioning the first
all-optical photonic switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires. Moreover, they
combined these photonic switches into a logic gate, a fundamental component of
computer chips that process information.