Research project funded by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
The purpose of this project is to enable the development of energy-efficient computing technologies.
The digitalization of our society poses several challenges, both in terms of computational workload due to the increasing amount of data, and in terms of impact on our environment due to the high energy demand. Current electronic technologies cannot withstand this development. Unless there is a breakthrough in sustainable, energy-efficient computing at the hardware level, all logic, artificial intelligence and quantum operations dreams and goals will flatten out.
The main aim of this project is to demonstrate that light, which is a faster and less dissipative way to process information, can be used in combination with advanced materials to enable the development of energy-efficient computing technologies. To achieve this goal, we need to uncover and understand fundamental light-matter interactions in novel materials able to carry, transfer and process information with light, preferably at the nanometre (1 nm = 10-9 m) scale to make billions of devices on a chip. Therefore, developing optical components operating faster and consuming much less energy than their electronic counterparts is a fundamental challenge in technology and engineering.
By leveraging on our interdisciplinary expertise in ultrafast condensed matter physics, nanoscience, and materials engineering, we target to control with short light pulses the electronic and magnetic properties of optical metamaterials, that is materials possessing an optical response not displayed by natural materials. In this way, we will develop new schemes for low-dissipative light-driven logic operations and data processing, one million times faster than current electronics, with an impact on rising areas such as spintronics, quantum technology, artificial intelligence, and cryptography.
Read more on the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation website
