Despite the widespread use of optical communication lines with transceivers and lasers, fully optical data processing remains a secret with seven seals. A new study by a team of scientists from Russia and the UK will help move forward on this path. one of the fundamental mysteries of the strong interaction of light and organic molecules.
Organics interested scientists for a reason. The evolution of terrestrial organisms is inextricably linked with interaction with light. And it's very connected! Knowledge of the fundamental laws of these bonds will help to advance far in the development of electronics based on organic materials. Light-emitting diodes, lasers, and the now popular OLED screens are just a small part of the industry that can accelerate its growth thanks to new knowledge.
A breakthrough in understanding the phenomena of the strong interaction of light with organic molecules was made by a team of scientists from the Skoltech Hybrid Photonics Laboratory and the University of Sheffield (UK). Tight-coupling principles open up unique opportunities for all-optical processing of information without the significant loss in speed and energy of signals when converted to current, which is the case today. This study is the subject of an article in Nature Communications Physics (English text is freely available at ).
As in the case of previous studies of strong interactions of light (photons) with substances, scientists studied the "mixing" of photons with electronic excitation of molecules or excitons. The interaction of photons with quasiparticles excitons leads to the appearance of other quasiparticles - polaritons. Polaritons combine the high speed of light propagation and the electronic properties of matter. To put it simply, the photon is, as it were, materialized and acquires properties similar to those of the same electron. With this already !
On the basis of a polariton, it is possible to create a working transistor and, in the future, a processor. Such a calculator will not require radiating and photoconverting sensors, which have low efficiency and low productivity, and today the team from Skoltech put an end to the riddle of polariton interactions.
βIt is known from experiments that during the condensation of polaritons in an organic matter, a sharp shift in the spectral properties occurs, and this shift always leads to an increase in the frequency of polaritons. This is an indicator of non-linear processes occurring in the system, just like, for example, a change in the color of a metal as it heats up.
The group analyzed the experimental data and established the key dependences of the polariton frequency shift on the most important parameters of the interaction of light with organic molecules. For the first time, a strong influence of energy transfer between neighboring molecules on the nonlinear properties of polaritons was discovered. This revealed the driving force of polaritons. Knowing the nature of the mechanism, one can develop the theory and confirm it with practical experiments, for example, link several polariton condensates into a single circuit to build polariton processors.
Source: 3dnews.ru