Opening the gate to electromagnonics information processing | Hacker News Reader

Opening the gate to electromagnonics information processing

news.uchicago.edu

38 pointsrbanffy5 comments

Here's the original article published by Argonne National Laboratory: https://www.anl.gov/article/opening-the-gate-to-the-next-gen...

Here's the paper in Physical Review Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...

A few highlights from the technical article:

> Their pivotal discovery allows real-time control of information transfer between microwave photons and magnons.

> Wireless communications use microwave photons are elementary particles that form electromagnetic waves. Meanwhile, another concept called “magnons” can also carry information. Magnons are wave-like disturbances in an ordered array of microscopically aligned spins that occur in certain magnetic materials.

> Using a novel method involving energy-level tuning, the team was able to rapidly switch between magnonic and photonic states over a period shorter than the magnon or photon lifetimes. This period is a mere 10 to 100 nanoseconds.

> And it could result in a new generation of classical electronic and quantum signal devices that can be used in various applications such as signal switching, low-power computing and quantum networking.

I cannot seem connect the device and its effect with information processing? The device does not seem able to simulate gates in modern large scale circuit, right?

Seems like the gate is electronic:

>“We start by tuning the photon and magnon with an electric pulse so that they have the same energy level,” said Zhang. “Then, the information exchange starts between them and continues until the electric pulse is turned off, which shifts the energy level of the magnon away from that of the photon.”

It seems like more of a mechanism to use this as a bridge between two media types and this is a mechanism to control it at a much higher bandwidth than the previous mechanism which:

>However, such tuning has depended on changing the geometric configuration of the device. That typically requires much longer than the magnon lifetime—on the order of 100 nanoseconds (one-hundred billionths of a second). This lack of a rapid tuning mechanism for interacting magnons and photons has made it impossible to achieve any real-time gating control.

It looks to be a transmission gate (a controlled switch). It’s analogous to a N-type MOSFET. If they can create an additional transmission gate that couples the inputs only when the gate pulse isn’t present, then they’ve achieved similar to a P-type MOSFET, and they could implement logic in almost the same way CMOS does.

It would be helpful if the article gave at least some basic information about the device physics.

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