Gizmo Converts Light Into Motion

HollyMinkowski

This looks like a breakthrough in optical switching that
moves us closer to 3 dimensional processor construction.

Article said...
A tiny ladderlike beam of silicon converts light into vibrations and vice versa with extremely high efficiency, physicists report. That may seem like an esoteric result, but the finding could open the way to new physics and someday serve as a key element in optical microcircuits akin to the electronic microcircuits in computer chips.

sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1020/1

skylight

very interesting, it may also lead to a more efficient conversion of free energy like the sun?

Beau Schwabe

Hmmm... along the lines of what skylight said, I wonder what the piezo effects would be in the GHz range? Could that mechanical motion be heterodyned down to something audible? <- more in the mechanical range of a piezo

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Beau Schwabe

IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.

CounterRotatingProps

Wonder if similar forces are at play in optical tweezers. ( ... still seems a tad bizarre to me that you can hold small - living - low-cell count creatures in place with beams of light... without hurting them.)

It's my understanding that the "breakthrough" in photonics won't happen until there is a *direct* conversion of one frequency of light to another, or to some other form of energy (electrons) at the quanta level.

@Skylight & Beau - you might be interested in looking up Nano Antenna's (or as the inventors call them "Nantennas"). These receive short and medium IR - the problem is how to down convert to a reasonable frequency for conversion to electricity... consider the days when microwaves were totally new ... same issues, only transposed many orders of magnitude up in freq.!

- H

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