https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170518083031.htm To put this in perspective, it has only been in the last few years that physicists have published what they believe is the first complete quantum mechanical model of 500 distinctive states of matter. Forget about gas, liquid, sold, and plasma, there are no less than 500 states of matter which get really funky thanks to quantum mechanics. In this case, they are using topological insulators which are state of matter just discovered within the last ten years that, due to their nanometer size and shape, will only conduct electricity on the outside. It is one of the hottest areas of research in materials science today that holds the promise of Star Wars and Star Trek technology that has long been believed impossible and this research is merely one of the first results to demonstrate the real possibility of commercial applications sometime in the near future. The article is a bit misleading because, at just a few nanometers, topological insulators are much too small to actually contain visible light waves which are around 400-700 nanometers in length, while features on the newest generation of commercial chips are around the 10nm scale. Instead, topological insulators can convert the information in the light into surface plasmon waves in the electromagnetic field on their surface. That's one of the reasons optics have been held back in computing is because optical wavelengths require a lot more space on a chip than electrons. Anyway, this is one of the more interesting developments in recent years in topological insulators and I'll have to keep my eye on this one to see what the issues are with pixel size they refer to but, theoretically, it also means you could produce an all optical computer that operates at speeds of up to 270thz, or a million times faster than anything today, using mere milliwatts of power. What else can be done with this kind of technology is anyone's guess at this point because even the theory of topological insulators is new and they possess outrageous properties that make them useful for superconducting circuitry and use with Josephson Junctions and who knows what else.
