NEWSROOM

Researchers investigating atomic-scale phenomena impacting next-generation electronic and quantum devices have captured the first microscopy images of atomic thermal vibrations, revealing a new type of motion that could reshape the design of quantum technologies and ultrathin electronics.

The chip, as thin as a strand of hair, uses two pairs of microring modulators to achieve unprecedented performance levels.

The team shares what they believe is the world’s most electrically conductive organic molecule. Their discovery, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, opens up new possibilities for constructing smaller, more powerful computing devices at the molecular scale. Even better, the molecule is composed of chemical elements found in nature—mostly carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen.

This work was a big step toward sustainable computing, because encoding data via spin waves (whose quasiparticles are called magnons) could eliminate the energy loss, or Joule heating, associated with electron-based devices. But at the time, the spin wave signals could not be used to reset the magnetic bits to overwrite existing data.

The new device involves a tiny silicon beam that vibrates at 5 gigahertz and couples to a microwave resonator—essentially a nanoscale box in which photons bounce around, also at 5 GHz. Using a technique called electrostatic actuation, developed previously by the Mirhosseini lab for quantum applications, a microwave photon gets converted within that box to a mechanical vibration of the beam, and that mechanical oscillation, with the help of laser light, gets converted by the r

"We've demonstrated that not only can we create 3D structures from DNA, but integrate them into microchips as part of the workflow of how...