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very nice! "For a start, the wires operate well as switches that by some measures compare well to field effect transistors. For example they allow a million times more current to flow when they are on compared with off when operating at a voltage of about 1.5 V. "[A light effect transistor] can replicate the basic switching function of the modern field effect transistor with competitive (and potentially improved) characteristics," say Marmon and co. But they wires also have entirely new capabilities. The device works as an optical amplifier and can also perform basic logic operations by using two or more laser beams rather than one. That's something a single field effect transistor cannot do."

any idea how the shine the light selectively to such small surfaces?

"Illumination sources consisted of halogen light, 532.016, 441.6, and 325 nm lasers ported through a Horiba LabRAM HR800 confocal Raman system with an internal 632.8 nm laser. Due to limited probe spacing for electrical measurements, all illumination sources were focused through a 50x long working distance (LWD) objective lens (N.A. = 0.50), except 325 nm, which went through a 10x MPLAN objective lens (N.A. = 0.25)." Laser spot size calculated from optical diffraction formula 1.22*lambda/NA

Strong evidence for d-electron spin transport at room temperature

WOW! Great non-local signals, at room temperature!!! Spin transistor on the way finally!? (of course electric field gate controlled is fundamental) See more about the "quest" for the spin transistor here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the-quest-for-the-spin-transistor

Amazing engineering feat: 1 nm transistor. Besides we can argue Moore law is still OK, dennard scaling is gone and with it the performance boost, as alluded subtly. Link article: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6308/99.full

Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. They are now back in nano-form as "nanoscale vacuum channel transistors" that combine the best of vacuum tubes and modern semiconductors into a single device. This old-technology with a new twist could be useful for space applications due to broader temperature operational range and better radiation resilience - authors are with NASA Ames.

optical transistors?

optical transistors coming?

Slime powered transistors with memory.

A new class of 2D semiconductor has been developed by researchers in the US. The free-standing quantum membranes, which are made of indium arsenide (InAs) and are just a few layers thick, have properties that are in stark contrast to the semiconductor layers used in conventional transistors.

wow, looks pretty cool! I wonder what is "a ridiculous amount of memory on a chip"...? giga, tera, peta, exa, ... ?

Looks cool indeed, but as with all those technology "breakthroughs" my enthusiasm will be limited until this actually makes it to my laptop...

what a phrase: "this advance could increase the power and memory of computers to nearly unimaginable proportions within only a couple of years." ... sure ....

Two research teams have designed an optical gate that can 'switch off' a stream of photons as well as store them ... good news for optical communications as well as future photon-based quantum information systems.

Amazing! :-D Makes you forget how hard it is to detect individual atoms at all.

While amazing indeed, it makes me wonder how much longer we will still have to wait until all this nanotechnology stuff will deliver something actually useful (say super-efficient/super-small transistors in my cell phone, camera, computer, etc.)? So far it seems to excel mostly in marketing...

Built in Silicon technology (Samsung's 28 nm process), its power is measured as one million neurons and 256 million synapses. It contains 5.4 million transistor being the largest IBM chip in these terms. All this said, it consumes less than 100 mW!! "These systems can efficiently process high-dimensional, noisy sensory data in real time, while consuming orders of magnitude less power than conventional computer architectures." IBM is working with initLabs to integrate the DVS retinal camera with these chips = real time image neuro-like image processing. In what seems to be a very successful project hugely funded by DARPA, "Our sights are now set high on the ambitious goal of integrating 4,096 chips in a single rack with 4 billion neurons and 1 trillion synapses while consuming ~4kW of power."

interesting paper for wireless energy transmission ... Duncan have a look ...

Yeah, its nice to see some research into semiconductors which aren't silicon. This paper would be useful for us if we wanted to do a study of the efficiency of the DC to microwave conversion systems for SPS.

Guinness World Record breaking, "first radio amplifier operating at terahertz frequencies could lead to communications systems with much higher data rates, better radar, high-resolution imaging that could penetrate smoke and fog, and better ways of identifying dangerous substances, say the researchers who built it". Built from HEMTs (High Electron Mobility Transistors) made of InP (Indium Phosphide), this is a new milestone on the road to the THz applications.