The plasmonic switch

A research team at Penn State has developed a plasmonic switch that may help pave the way for the next generation of super-fast computers.

“If plasmonics are realized, the future will have circuits as small as the current electronic ones with a capacity a million times better,” said Tony Jun Huang, James Henderson assistant professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics. “Plasmonics combines the speed and capacity of photonic — light based — circuits with the small size of electronic circuits.”

Source

Penn State Live

LUCAS

Professor Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA has taken a typical Sony Ericsson phone, and by adding a few off-the-shelf parts that cost less than $50, he can get it to produce a remarkable image that shows the thousands of cells in a small fluid sample such as human blood.

The device is called LUCAS, which stands for lensless ultra-wide-field cell monitoring array platform based on shadow imaging. It uses a short wavelength blue light to illuminate a sample of liquid -- blood, saliva or another fluid -- on a laboratory slide.

Source

A Terabit Internet

Two groups of engineers—one from Australia and Denmark and the other from California—have independently created new optics technologies that could greatly increase the Internet’s speed limits. The key to the new technologies is nonlinear optics, in which physics allows for an optical fiber’s properties to be adjusted from moment to moment.

Source

Self-Assembling Optics

A group of researchers led by Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, have recently created nanoscale particles that can self-assemble into various optical devices. These include photonic crystals, metamaterials, color changing paints, components for optical computers and ultrasensitive chemical sensors, among many other potential applications. The new technology works by controlling how densely the tiny silver particles assemble themselves.

Source