Making an optical switch by drawing lines in gold - 0 views
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Walid Damouny on 18 Feb 10"Basically, any computing device (or switch, or router) that is based on light requires a nonlinear interaction between different light beams, but light doesn't like to do nonlinear stuff. With current technology, you can get efficient nonlinear optical interactions, but the hardware is kind of bulky or very delicate. Not the sort of thing you want to put in a billion devices. What my friends in Barcelona have demonstrated is that it's possible to create a relatively efficient optical nonlinear interaction in a nano-structured metallic surface. "