Researchers at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics together with colleagues at Harvard University and the Vienna University of Technology have developed an experimental optical switch that’s controlled by a single photon — the optical analog of a transistor, the fundamental component of a computing circuit.
Optical computing — using light rather than electricity to perform calculations — could could point toward new designs for both classical and quantum computers.
But optical computing requires light particles — photons — to modify each other’s behavior, something they’re naturally averse to doing: Two photons that collide in a vacuum simply pass through each other.
READ MORE ON KURZWEIL | AI
Optical switch can be controlled by single photon through mirrors
