For nearly 80 years, modern computing has depended on electrons rushing through circuits. This same idea powered the earliest electronic machines, such as ENIAC, and still drives today’s smartphones, laptops, and massive AI data centers.
However, artificial intelligence is now exposing a serious weakness in electronic computing. Electrons generate heat, lose energy, and become increasingly difficult to manage as chips grow more complex.
Training and running advanced AI models already consume enormous amounts of electricity, raising fears that future systems may become too power-hungry to sustain efficiently. Scientists have long hoped photons could solve this problem.
“Because they are charge-neutral and have zero rest mass, photons can carry information quickly over long distances with minimal loss, dominating communications technology,” Li He, an assistant professor at the physics department of Montana State University, said.
This is why light already dominates internet communications through fiber-optic cables. However, photons come with a major drawback. “They barely interact with their environment, making them bad at the sort of signal-switching logic that computers depend on,” He added.
Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they may have found a way around this limitation by creating a strange hybrid particle that behaves both like light and matter at the same time.
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