A man-made "optical boom" in a sheet of graphene can produce an intense, focused beam of light that will lead to the development of future microchips with speeds over a million times faster than those used in computers and mobile devices today.

Funded by the US Army, researchers at MIT, Israel, Croatia and Singapore discovered that a flow of electric current can, under certain circumstances, exceed the speed of slowed-down light and produce a kind of optical boom. This discovery represents  an entirely new way of converting electricity into visible radiation.

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It's fast, highly controllable and efficient, said the MIT researchers. More important, it will lead to a wide variety of new applications.

The researchers said using light instead of flowing electrons to move and store and data can massively increase microchip operating speeds up to incredibly higher levels compared to those in today's chips.

Although still theoretical, the discovery adds a new dimension to graphene's potential to produce blazingly fast microchips. Scientists at IBM Research have been exploring how graphene can be used to create new chips that exploit the way electrons move faster through graphene than through other semiconductor materials.

The optic boom allows electrons to pass through graphene at up to a million meters per second or 1/300 the speed of light in a vacuum. This represents a totally new way of producing light from electricity compared to light produced by LEDs or compact fluorescent lights.

This new "plasmon-based approach" might eventually be part of more efficient, more compact, faster and more tunable alternatives for certain applications, said the researchers.

More important, this is a way of efficiently and controllably generating plasmons on a scale compatible with current microchip technology. These graphene-based systems could potentially be key on-chip components in the development of new, light-based circuits, which are considered a major new direction in the evolution of computing technology toward ever-smaller and more efficient devices.

Plasmons are a kind of virtual particle that represents the oscillations of electrons on the surface.

The work was reported in the journal Nature Communications in a paper by two MIT professors: Marin Soljačić, professor of physics, and John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of physics and postdoc Ido Kaminer.

The team included researchers Yichen Shen, Ognjen Ilic, and Josue Lopez at MIT; Yaniv Katan at Technion, in Haifa, Israel; Hrvoje Buljan at the University of Zagreb in Croatia and Liang Jie Wong at the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology.

The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. 

TagsGraphene, optical boom, US Army, MIT