The physicsworld magazine has chosen the recent research of Dr. Marcus Ossiander and Prof. Martin Schultze as one of the top ten breakthroughs of 2022. With their paper “The speed limit of optoelectronics“ published in March 2022, they have explored the limits of optoelectronic circuits.
The team used laser pulses lasting just one femtosecond to switch a sample of a dielectric material from an insulating to a conducting state at the speed needed to realize a switch that operates 1000 trillion times a second (one petahertz). “Although the Apartment-sized apparatus required to drive this super-fast switch means it will not appear in practical devices any time soon, the results imply a fundamental limit for classical signal processing and suggest that petahertz solid-state optoelectronics is, in principle feasible”, says Hamish Johnston, editor at physicsworld.

Original publication:

the speed limit of optoelectronics

M. Ossiander, K. Golyari, K. Scharl, L. Lehnert, F. Siegrist, J. Bürger, D. Zimin, J. Gessner, M. Weidman, I. Floss, V. Smejkal, S. Donsa, C. Lemell, F. Libisch, N. Karpowicz, J. Burgdörfer, F. Krausz, M. Schultze
Nature Communications 13, 1620 (2022)