LONDON: Engineers and physicists have discovered a property of silicon which could aid the development of faster computers.
Currently, copper wires transfer information in a computer; the process is slowed down as the wires heat up.
“Photonic” and “spintronic” computing is the principle of transferring information by light or electron spin.
This new property means that silicon-based light detectors identify spin, so more information can be transferred.
Spin is a property of sub-atomic particles, which influences the ordering of electrons and nuclei in atoms and molecules.
The discovered property is usually observed in materials containing heavy elements, which are difficult to integrate into existing computing systems that are composed mainly of silicon.
Silicon is a highly symmetrical crystal, but by changing the geometry of it, the team was able to impart “chiral” properties to it. Something is chiral if the mirror image of the object cannot be superimposed on the original.
