Nanotechnology Now - Press Release: "Penn engineers efficiently 'mix' light at the nanoscale"

 Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have engineered a nanowire system that could pave the way for this ability, combining two light waves to produce a third with a different frequency and using an optical cavity to amplify the intensity of the output to a usable level.

The study was led by Ritesh Agarwal, professor of materials science and engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Ming-Liang Ren, a post-doctoral researcher in his lab. Other members of the Agarwal lab, Wenjing Liu, Carlos O. Aspetti and Liaoxin Sun, contributed to the study.

It was published in Nature communications. Current computer systems represent bits of information -- the 1's and 0's of binary code -- with electricity. Circuit elements, such as transistors, operate on these electric signals, producing outputs that are dependent on their inputs. "Mixing two input signals to get a new output is the basis of computation," Agarwal said. "It's easy to do with electric signals, but it's not easy to do with light, as light waves don't normally interact with one another."