Light burst "opens up new field of possibilities"

Melbourne (PTI): In a new study, a completely unexpected burst of light showed researchers what they claim is a new way to manipulate light using silicon-based chips.

According to them, the sparkle of green light from a silicon chip has opened up a whole new field of possibilities for communications devices, including exponentially shrinking hardware needed to guarantee high-quality Internet connection.

"When I saw the green light on the camera, I was extremely puzzled. We were using infrared light, not green. Besides, silicon does not transmit light at that wavelength," said Christian Grillet of Sydney University.

But, the effect was real. The infrared laser was being converted to green light — light of higher energy — in a new process known as third harmonic generation, the latest edition of the Nature Photonics journal reported.

Co-researcher Christelle Monat said: "One could imagine that a small green light indicator could help users of numerous Internet applications.

"This could be used to immediately inform companies such as Skype of a problem in clarity of their connections, thereby allowing them to fix this in real-time, all without the end-user even noticing.

"Being able to control light on a chip, along wires no wider than one hundredth of the width of a human hair, represents the first step to realise all sorts of operations with significantly better performance than electronics alone.

"And if we can do that in silicon, even more complex and exciting architectures become possible by integrating and marrying both the photonic and electronic worlds."