Phys.org February 8, 2021 Wiring up the transistors of an optical circuit with silicon waveguides is an important requirement to make compact, highly integrated chips. However, silicon is a strong absorber of visible light. To circumvent the absorption issue researchers in Switzerland used high contrast grating consisting of nanometer sized “posts” lined up in such a way that light passing through the posts interferes destructively with light passing between posts making sure that no light can “leak” through the grating. Most of the light gets reflected inside the waveguide. They showed that there was a loss of only 13 percent […]
Tag Archives: Optical chips
What if we could teach photons to behave like electrons?
Phys.org February 19, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – Stanford University, China) tricked the photons—which are intrinsically non-magnetic—into behaving like charged electrons by sending the photons through carefully designed mazes in a way that caused the light particles to behave as if they were being acted upon by what the scientists called a “synthetic” or “artificial” magnetic field. They designed structures that created magnetic forces capable of pushing photons in predictable and useful ways. To bring photons into the proximities required to create these magnetic effects, the researchers used lasers, fiber optic cables and other off-the-shelf scientific equipment. […]