U. physicists work toward ultra-fast computing

Think your computer isn't fast enough or your TV picture still not clear enough? How does faster than the speed of light sound? Or monitors bright enough you'll want your sunglasses?

Well, they're working on it.

Scientists are using the properties inside electrons that spin at an idling speed faster than light to show the way to a new generation of ultra-fast computers and electronics.

That new era just got a a little closer, according to findings published Sunday by a team of University of Utah physicists who managed to successfully switch an electric current on and off using the "spin" within electrons.

The findings are a key step toward "spin transistors" that will lead to the semiconductor switch of the future. The research is a continuation of mapping the properties of electrons, first detected in the 1920s, a breakthrough that has led to so-called "spintronics" and is regarded as critical to understanding the nature of things as the theory of relativity.

Researchers hope to develop computers that are much smaller and faster by using electrons' spin as well as their electrical charge to store and transmit information; the up and down spins of electrons also can represent ones and zeroes in computing.

Computers and other electronics today operate by causing negatively charged electrons to flow as electrical current. In computers, for example, data and information is reduced by transistors to a binary code of ones or zeroes, represented by the presence or absence of electrons in semiconductors.

Getting to that ultra-fast future won't be easy, and will take what amounts to a step back, or at least a reassessment, of a key element in the new electronics: making highly efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) using organic materials. It is going to be more difficult than first thought.

A possible new light of future generations was captured as an orange glow by U. physicists John Lupton and Christoph Boehme using green and blue laser beams to excite a one-twelfth-inch long by one-eighth-inch wide piece of the polymer MEH-PP, a basic component in the LED in new computer screens, telephone displays, DVD players, game consoles, televisions and other electronics.

The researchers note, however, that such LEDs would convert no more than 25 percent of electricity into light rather than heat. The findings contradict earlier estimates that up to 63 percent of electricity would be turned into light.

The finding is not a surprise given the course of quantum mechanics, the most recent frontier of physics that is attempting to describe the behavior of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles.

"This is the first time anyone has done really fundamental, hands-on quantum mechanics with an organic LED," Lupton said in a news release announcing the study. "This is tough stuff."

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