Researchers are working on computers that use light, or photons, instead of electrical currents to store information and perform calculations. Machines built around light have the potential to run faster and use far less energy than today’s electronics.
One of the biggest obstacles in building these systems—still an emerging technology—is the difficulty of redirecting extremely small light signals inside a chip without reducing their strength. Solving this requires new approaches to materials design. These devices must include a lightweight substance capable of blocking unwanted light arriving from every direction, an ability provided by an “isotropic bandgap material.”
Scientists at New York University have now identified a material called “gyromorphs” that meets this requirement more effectively than any structure studied so far. Gyromorphs combine characteristics of both liquids and crystals and outperform all known materials at preventing light from entering from any angle. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, introduce a new strategy for tuning optical behavior and could help move light-based computing forward.
“Gyromorphs are unlike any known structure in that their unique makeup gives rise to better isotropic bandgap materials than is possible with current approaches,” says Stefano Martiniani, an assistant professor of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and neural science, and the paper’s senior author.
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