MIT researchers' graphene breakthrough promises microprocessors one million times faster

Technique to slow down the speed of light with graphene to create an "optical boom"

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claim to have developed a technique for using graphene that could lead to the development of microprocessors that can run up to one million times faster than today's fastest chips.

They claim that by using graphene to slow down the speed of light to the extent that it moves slower than flowing electrons they could create an "optical boom", the optical equivalent of a sonic boom.

Slowing the speed of light is no mean feat on its own, but the researchers at MIT claim to have managed it by using the honeycomb shape of carbon to slow photons to several hundred times their normal speed in a free space, said researcher Ido Kaminer.

"Graphene has this ability to trap light, in modes we call surface plasmons," said Kaminer, the research paper's lead author. Plasmons are a "virtual particle" that represents the oscillations of electrons on the surface. The speed of these plasmons through the graphene is "a few hundred times slower than light in free space", he added.

Meanwhile, the characteristics of graphene speed up electrons to one million metres a second, or around 1/300 of the speed of light in a vacuum.

The optical boom is caused when the electrons passing though the graphene reach the speed of light, effectively breaking its barrier in the carbon honeycomb and causing a shockwave of light.

As electrons move faster than the trapped light, they bleed plasmons. Effectively, it is the equivalent of turning electricity into light. This is nothing new - Thomas Edison did it a century ago with fluorescent tubes - but it can efficiently and controllably generate plasmons at a scale that works with microchip technology.

The discovery could allow chip components to be made from graphene, enabling the creation of light-based circuits. These circuits could be the next step in the evolution of chip and computing technology - provided the technology can be made to work reliably outside of the labs.

It's so much faster that Kaminer claims that it could be "six orders of magnitude higher than what is used in electronics [today]". That's up to one million times faster in plain English.

"There's a lot of excitement about graphene because it could be easily integrated with other electronics," said physics professor Marin Soljačić, a researcher on the project, who is confident that MIT can turn this theoretical experiment into a working system. "I have confidence that it should be do-able within one to two years."

This is a pretty big concept and almost sci-fi stuff, but we're always keen to see smaller and faster chips. It also shows that the future tech envisioned by the world of sci-fi may not be that far away.