Russian scientists, together with American scientists, have created an optical "transistor" that speeds up all calculations by a factor of 1000

A group of international scientists, led by scientists from Skoltech, as well as engineers from IBM (USA) have successfully created and tested extremely energy-efficient optical switch (controlling photons), which in the future could replace classical electronic transistors in new optical computers.

At the same time, the new switch not only greatly conserves energy, but also does not require additional cooling and provides simply unprecedented performance.

As tests have shown, an optical transistor can perform up to a trillion operations per second. This is, for a minute, 1000 times faster than any modern commercial transistor.

How the new optical "transistor" works

As stated by the first author of the scientific research A. Zasedatelev, the device they created has almost maximum energy efficiency due to the fact that only a few photons are needed to switch it.

Since, in essence, a photon is the smallest particle of light known at the moment, in fact, scientists have approached the practical limit of energy efficiency.

If we compare with modern electrical transistors, then most of them require tens of times more energy. to perform switching, and those that are similar in efficiency to the new optical transistor, work essentially slower.

In addition, the optical transistor developed by scientists is able to function perfectly at room temperature, which means that it does not require bulky cooling systems.

Additionally, the switch developed by scientists is capable of acting as a linking device that transfers data between other devices in the form of optical signals.

In addition, the new device can act as an amplifier, increasing the input signal intensity by almost 23,000 times.

For successful operation, the device uses two lasers in order to set its state at the "0" or "1" level, and also switch between these states.

At the moment, scientists are working to further reduce the total energy consumption of the device, in which the pump laser is currently the main consumer.

So engineers plan to use perovskite supercrystalline materials in new versions of the product, which are excellent for for these purposes, since they show a strong interaction of light with matter and how, as a result, they exhibit such an effect as superradiance.

Scientists emphasize that the principle of optical single-photon switching developed by them is quite capable extend to other optical components such as logic gates, cascade amplifiers and etc.

So the work on such components inevitably brings scientists closer to the creation of a fully functioning optical computer, in which the manipulations will be performed by photons, thus showing ultra-fast operation with minimal energy consumption.

Scientists have shared the results of the work already done on the pages of the journal Nature.

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