Capturing light - for the computers of tomorrow

Light is ideally suited to data transfer, as it can transmit large quantities of information in a very short time, and is an indispensable part of the IT world of today and tomorrow. However, a stumbling block so far has been the storage of large quantities of data directly in the optical domain. While optical fibre cables - and, with them, data transfer by means of light - have long since become part of our everyday life, data on a computer are still processed and stored electronically. But now a team of scientists from Germany and England have made a key breakthrough by capturing light on a chip, so developing the first non-volatile - i.e. permanent - all-optical on-chip memory. Traditional optical data storage media such as CDs or DVDs are slow, external mass-storage devices. Such technology is not suited to rapid data processing or for data storage on chips. "The all-optical memory devices we have developed provide opportunities that go far beyond any of the approaches to optical data processing available today," says Prof. Wolfram Pernice from the Institute of Physics at Münster University, who recently moved there from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and is one of the leading authors of the study.