Researchers build an all-optical transistor

Mon, 07/08/2013 - 9:30am
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office



In Science, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Research Laboratory of Electronics—together with colleagues at Harvard Univ. and the Vienna Univ. of Technology—describe the experimental realization of an optical switch that’s controlled by a single photon, allowing light to govern the transmission of light. As such, it’s the optical analog of a transistor, the fundamental component of a computing circuit.


The heart of the switch is a pair of highly reflective mirrors. When the switch is on, an optical signal—a beam of light—can pass through both mirrors. When the switch is off, only about 20% of the light in the signal can get through.

The paired mirrors constitute what’s known as an optical resonator. “If you had just one mirror, all the light would come back,” explains Vladan Vuletić, the Lester Wolfe Prof. of Physics at MIT, who led the new work. “When you have two mirrors, something very strange happens.”

Light can be thought of as particles— photons—but it can also be thought of as a wave—an electromagnetic field. Even though, on the particle description, photons are stopped by the first mirror, on the wave description, the electromagnetic field laps into the space between the mirrors. If the distance between the mirrors is precisely calibrated to the wavelength of the light, Vuletić explains, “Basically, a very large field builds up inside the cavity that cancels the field coming back and goes in the forward direction.” In other words, the mirrors become transparent to light of the right wavelength.

Clouding over
In the RLE researchers’ experiment, the cavity between the mirrors is filled with a gas of supercooled cesium atoms. Ordinarily, these atoms don’t interfere with the light passing through the mirrors. But if a single “gate photon” is fired into their midst at a different angle, kicking just one electron of one atom into a higher energy state, it changes the physics of the cavity enough that light can no longer pass through it.

Joining Vuletić on the paper are lead author Wenlan Chen and Kristin M. Beck, both graduate students in his group; Robert Bücker of the Vienna Univ. of Technology; and Michael Gullans, Mikhail D. Lukin and Haruka Tanji-Suzuki of Harvard.

For conventional computers, the chief advantage of optical computing would be in power management: As computer chips have more and more transistors crammed onto them, they draw more power and run hotter. Computing with light instead of electricity would address both problems.

Of course, clouds of supercooled atoms are not a practical design for the transistors in, say, a Web server. “For the classical implementation, this is more of a proof-of-principle experiment showing how it could be done,” Vuletić says. “One could imagine implementing a similar device in solid state—for example, using impurity atoms inside an optical fiber or piece of solid.”

Going quantum

Primitive quantum computers have been built using laser-trapped ions and nuclear magnetic resonance, but it’s hard to keep their bits—or “qubits,” for quantum bits—in superposition. Superposition is much easier to preserve in photons, for exactly the same reason that it’s hard to get photons to interact.


A photon-switched transistor has other implications for quantum computing. For instance, Vuletić says, one of the first applications of a conventional transistor was to filter noise out of an electrical signal by feeding the transistor’s output back into it. “Quantum feedback can cancel—to the extent allowed by quantum mechanics—quantum noise,” Vuletić says. “You can make quantum states that you wouldn’t otherwise get.”

The switch could also be used as a photon detector: If a photon has struck the atoms, light won’t pass through the cavity. “That means you have a device that can detect a photon without destroying it,” Vuletić says. “That doesn’t exist today. It would have many applications in quantum information processing.”

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology


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