Silvana Botti and Jens Renč Suckert, whose research was awarded Breakthrough of the Year 2020. Image: Jürgen Scheere (University of Jena)
Silvana Botti and Jens Renč Suckert, whose research was awarded Breakthrough of the Year 2020. Image: Jürgen Scheere (University of Jena) - International Team is awarded the Breakthrough of the Year 2020 prize by Physics World magazine Light For the development of a light-emitting silicon alloy, researchers from TU Eindhoven, Netherlands and the University of Jena, Germany together with partners from the University of Linz and TU Munich, are today (17 December) being awarded the " Breakthrough of the Year " prize by Physics World magazine. In its paper, published in April 2020, the team, which includes Jens René Suckert and Prof. Silvana Botti of the University of Jena, shows for the first time that silicon alloys are suitable for emitting photons on a significant scale, thus paving the way for silicon lasers that could revolutionise optical data processing. The magazine Physics World has honoured international scientists with the Breakthrough of the Year annually since 2009. " Our work enables for the first time the production of silicon-based photonic computer chips that can work significantly faster with a strongly reduced energy consumption than previous electronic chips ," says Prof. Silvana Botti, explaining the importance of the development. Such microchips, which communicate with light particles (photons) instead of electrons, need an integrated laser that produces the photons directly on the chip. Until now, however, the semiconductor material silicon has been considered an extremely weak emitter of light.
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