Fergie's Tech Blog

New Molecules are Most Light-Sensitive Ever

Tom Simonite writes on NewScientistTech:

A new generation of super-light-sensitive compounds could make the internet and other optical networks faster, say researchers. The new class of carbon-based molecules interact with light more strongly than any tested before.

"They can beat a barrier that people have been trying to break for 20 years," says chemist Koen Clays, from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. "Some people were afraid we would never do so."

The barrier – known as the "Kuzyk gap" – is the distance between the theoretical maximum light/matter interaction and that observed in reality. For the last two decades or so, the best performing molecules have achieved just one-thirtieth of the sensitivity of the theoretical maximum interaction.

posted by Fergie @ 1/03/2007 11:01:00 AM