Speed and energy limits of light-field-driven petahertz electronics · revision history

Revision 2

Accepted · core change · record

Changes against revision 1:

Title
Speed and energy limits of light-field-driven petahertz electronics
Plain
The electric field of a laser oscillates about a million billion times per second, and it can push currents through solids and nanoscale junctions in step with each oscillation. Whether this can become working logic circuits, and how fast and cheap such switching can be, is unknown.
Precise · changed · core
Revision 1: Light-field-driven currents in dielectrics (SiO2), graphene-gold junctions and metal nanoantenna tunnel junctions, switched within one optical cycle (frequency about $1e15\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$). Quantities: the maximum switching bandwidth $f_{\mathrm{max}}$ and minimum energy per switching event set by real versus virtual carrier populations, dephasing, heating and circuit parasitics, and whether a logic stage can drive the next one with gain above 1. An answer is a cascaded light-field-driven gate with measured gain above 1 at f above $1e14\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$, or a derived bound that excludes it.
Revision 2: Light-field-driven currents in dielectrics ($\mathrm{SiO_2}$), graphene-gold junctions and metal nanoantenna tunnel junctions, switched within one optical cycle (frequency about $10^{15}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$). Quantities: the maximum switching bandwidth $f_{\max}$ and minimum energy per switching event set by real versus virtual carrier populations, dephasing, heating and circuit parasitics, and whether a logic stage can drive the next one with gain above 1. An answer is a cascaded light-field-driven gate with measured gain above 1 at f above $10^{14}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$, or a derived bound that excludes it.
Settled by
A demonstration of two cascaded light-field-driven logic stages with measured signal gain, or a derivation of a fundamental bound on gain and energy per operation.
Kind
well-posed
Answer type
value
References
(empty)
Literature status
open
Status note
A light-field logic gate based on real and virtual carriers in graphene-gold junctions was reported in 2022 (Boolakee et al., Nature); a 2024 review (Heide et al., Nature Reviews Physics) lists cascadability and parasitics as unsolved.
Posed since
(empty)

Decisions