Advanced information processing technologies offer greener telecommuni­cations and strong data security for millions, a study led by University of Maryland researchers revealed. A new device that can process infor­mation using a small amount of light could enable energy-efficient and secure communications. The work was led by You Zhou in colla­boration with researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Optical switches, the devices responsible for sending information via telephone signals, rely on light as a trans­mission medium and on electricity as a processing tool, requiring an extra set of energy to interpret the data. A new alternative engineered by Zhou uses only light to power a full transmission, which could improve speed and energy efficiency for telecommuni­cations and computation platforms. Early tests of this technology have shown significant energy improvements.

While conventional optical switches require between 10 to 100 femtojoules to enable a communication transmission, Zhou’s device consumes one hundred times less energy, which is only one tenth to one femtojoule. Building a prototype that enables information processing using small amounts of light via the non-linear response paved the way for new oppor­tunities in his research group. “Achieving strong non-linearity was unexpected, which opened a new direction that we were not previously exploring: quantum communi­cations,” said Zhou.

To build the device, Zhou used the Quantum Material Press (QPress) at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven Lab that offers free access to world-class equipment for scientists conducting open research. The QPress is an automated tool for synthe­sizing quantum materials with layers as thin as a single atom. “We have been collaborating with Zhou's group for several years. They are one of the earliest adopters of our QPress modules, which include an exfoliator, cataloger, and stacker,” said Suji Park, a staff scientist in the Electronic Nano­materials Group at CFN. “Speci­fically, we have provided high-quality exfoliated flakes tailored to their requests, and we worked together closely to optimize the exfoliation conditions for their materials. This partnership has signi­ficantly enhanced their sample fabri­cation process.”

Next up, Zhou’s research team aims to increase energy efficiency down to the smallest amount of electro­magnetic energy, a main challenge in enabling the quantum communi­cations, which offer a promising alternative for data security. In the wake of rising cyberattacks, building sophis­ticated protection against hackers has grown scientific interest. Data transmitted over conventional communication channels can be read and copied without leaving a trace, which cost thousands of breaches for 350 million users last year, according to a recent report. Quantum communi­cations, on the other hand, offer a promising alternative as they encode the information using light, which cannot be intercepted without altering its quantum state. Zhou’s method to improve materials' nonlinearity is a step closer to enabling those techno­logies. (Source: BNL)

Reference: L. Gu et al.: Giant optical nonlinearity of Fermi polarons in atomically thin semiconductors, Nat. Phot., online 14 May 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41566-024-01434-x

Link: Quantum Materials, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, USA