Single Photon Switch Can Speed Computation Up to 1,000 times
"An international research team led by Skoltech and IBM has created an extremely
energy-efficient optical switch that could replace electronic transistors in a new generation
of computers manipulating photons rather than electrons. In addition to direct power
saving, the switch requires no cooling and is really fast: At 1 trillion operations per second,
it is between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today’s top-notch commercial transistors.
It only takes a few photons to switch per the author of the study, Dr. Anton Zasedatelev.
They achieved switching with just one photon at room temperature. There will be a lot of
work to scale the proof-of-principle demonstration into an all-optical co-processor."
See:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/0...000-times.html