Stop Light on a Chip

Researchers have long dreamed of creating superfast computers that manipulate the quantum states of light beams rather than the classical states of electrons, as in today's technology. Now a paper in the 27 February PRL suggests a solution to what has been one of the major unanswered questions: How do you store a light signal in a chip? The team showed with computer simulations that rows of tiny semiconductor pillars could slow light waves to a stop and store them as electromagnetic fields oscillating within the pillars.

Atomic physicists have recently learned a trick some call "stopping light." In this technique, the vibrations of electromagnetic fields are transferred to the motions of electrons in a gas of atoms. But "people never thought it was possible" to do some thing similar in solid-state devices, says Shanhui Fan, of Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. Now Fan and Mehmet Fatih Yanik propose to capture light in a chain of coupled semiconductor pillars, which would store the light energy by allowing the electric and magnetic fields to bounce around inside them. The team hasn't yet built the device, but they have predicted its behavior with a massive computer simulation, which Fan describes as "the cleanest experiment."

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To read: Stopping Light All Optically