New half-light half-matter particles may hold the key to a computing revolution | Hacker News Reader

New half-light half-matter particles may hold the key to a computing revolution

exeter.ac.uk

89 pointsokket12 comments

This is interesting... a particular sort of surface plasmons which allow sub-wavelength patterning, which could mean nanoscale...

"Application of SPPs enables subwavelength optics in microscopy and lithography beyond the diffraction limit. It also enables the first steady-state micro-mechanical measurement of a fundamental property of light itself: the momentum of a photon in a dielectric medium. Other applications are photonic data storage, light generation, and bio-photonics."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plasmon_polariton

It's funny, last weekend I went on a research spree learning about SPPs and plasmonic metamaterials after stumbling upon them while studying acoustic metamaterials with a negative diffraction index.

Here is some further reading on Wikipedia if you're interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_metamaterial#Microsc...

Can you say if this technology will enable another ten or hundredfold increase in GHz and decrease in memory latency, giving us faster variants of our current technology, or if it will require an entirely new computing paradigm like with quantum computing?

The paper is entirely theoretical and controls the polarity by mechanically changing the distance between mirrors. I would say that this has a roughly 0% chance of having any direct practical impact in the next 20 years.

Here's an introduction to what the general field might give you: http://nelson.mit.edu/blog/terahertz-polaritonics-and-techni...

This field is pretty new relative to other options which have similar technological advantages, the stuff I learned about plasmonics in grad school was quite primitive despite being the state of the art 15 years ago. Whereas photonics and spintronics are much better established. I'd personally focus on graphene, single electron transistors, and photonics (with perhaps plasmonics for interfacing) as the most likely candidates for real-world improvements in the next 10 years.

They’re modifying the chirality of polaritons. Never heard of polaritons before now.

Google: Polaritons are hybrid particles made up of a photon strongly coupled to an electric dipole

There are many more of these so-called quasiparticles - and even crazier ones on top of that. You might enjoy having a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quasiparticles.

>They’re modifying the chirality of polaritons.

God I need to brush up on particle physics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccoj5lhLmSQ

"The researchers show that by embedding the honeycomb metasurface between two reflecting mirrors and changing the distance between them, one can tune the fundamental properties of the Dirac polaritons in a simple, controllable and reversible way."

That doesn't sound so simple.

Polaritons are quasi particles in the sense of solid-state physics,quantizations of lattice oscillations „induced“ by transversally polarizized photons. These are not particles in the sense of the standard model of particle physics.

One thing I am reminded of as I look at this page is that university sites almost never have advertisements on them. Can't say I miss phys.org or iflscience.

Universities publish press releases, in theory phys.org etc publish something like journalism, but how much they really go beyond the press releases is up for debate...

And that's why they load near instantly. Wish more of the web was like them or Hacker News.

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