Physicists from the Department of Nanophotonics and Metamaterials at ITMO University have experimentally demonstrated the feasibility of designing an optical analog of a transistor based on a single silicon nanoparticle. Because transistors are some of the most fundamental components of computing circuits, the results of the study have crucial importance for the development of optical computers, where transistors must be very small and ultrafast at the same time. The study was published in the scientific journal Nano Letters. The performance of modem computers, which use electrons as signal carriers, is largely limited by the time needed to trigger the transistor -- usually around 0.1 - 1 nanoseconds (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Next-generation optical computers, however, rely on photons to carry the useful signal, which heavily increases the amount of information passing through the transistor per second.
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