EurekAlert May 6, 2020
An international team of researchers (Australia, Germany, Denmark) propose to use phonons to store and transfer information that chips receive from fibre-optic cables. They show a way to counteract the intrinsic acoustic decay of the phonons in a waveguide by resonantly reinforcing the acoustic wave via synchronized optical pulses. They experimentally demonstrated coherent on-chip storage in amplitude and phase up to 40 ns, 4 times the intrinsic acoustic lifetime in the waveguide. Through theoretical considerations, they anticipate that this concept allows for storage times up to microseconds within realistic experimental limitations while maintaining a GHz bandwidth of the optical signal…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE