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Possible new component of next-generation computers (Image 2)
A close-up view of the beam created by the vortex laser. Because the laser beam travels in a corkscrew pattern, encoding information into different vortex twists, it’s able to carry 10 times or more the amount of information than that of conventional lasers. The optics advancement could become a central component of next-generation computers designed to handle society’s growing demand for information sharing.
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For several decades, researchers have been able to pack more and more components onto silicon-based computer chips, which is why today's smartphones have more computing power than the world’s most powerful computers of the 1980s. But researchers are running into a problems where existing technology may no longer meet society’s demand for data and some predictions suggest this could happen within the next five years.
"To transfer more data while using less energy, we need to rethink what’s inside these machines," says Liang Feng, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the study’s co-lead author.
Researchers are looking at a number of ways to address this problem including optical communications -- using light to carry information.
Lasers are a central part of today’s optical communication systems and the UB-led team is pushing laser technology forward using another light manipulation technique called orbital angular momentum, which distributes the laser in a corkscrew pattern with a vortex at the center. The UB team shrunk the vortex laser to the point where it is compatible with computer chips. Because the laser beam travels in a corkscrew pattern, encoding information into different vortex twists, it’s able to carry 10 times or more the amount of information than that of conventional lasers, which move linearly.
The vortex laser is one component of many, such as advanced transmitters and receivers that will ultimately be needed to continue building more powerful computers and datacenters.
The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (grant DMR 15-06884).
To learn more about this research, see the UB news story Vortex laser offers hope for Moore’s Law. (Date image taken: 2016; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: Jan. 25, 2017) [Image 2 of 2 related images. Back to Image 1.]
Credit: Natalia Litchinitser, University at Buffalo
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