Mind-Blowing Discovery: Hidden Forces Within Diamond Accelerate Electronic Devices a Thousandfold

Scientists have unveiled a stunning discovery: hidden forces within diamond play a critical role in how materials respond to light at ultrafast speeds. By employing cutting-edge techniques with ultrashort light pulses, researchers demonstrated how virtual charges can accelerate electronic devices by a factor of one thousand compared to current technology, opening new avenues for next-generation, ultrafast electronics.

The Forgotten but Essential Element: Virtual Charges

The study, published in Nature Photonics and led by the Politecnico di Milano, highlights a crucial yet often overlooked aspect: the contribution of virtual charges. According to Science Daily, these charge carriers exist only during the interaction with light but significantly impact the material’s response speed.

The research, conducted in partnership with the University of Tsukuba, the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, and the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies (Cnr-Ifn), investigated the behavior of single-crystal diamond exposed to light pulses lasting only a few attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second). To achieve this, the team used an advanced technique called Attosecond Transient Reflectivity Spectroscopy.

Shifting the Paradigm of Light-Solid Interaction

By comparing experimental data with state-of-the-art digital simulations, the researchers successfully isolated the effect of the so-called virtual vertical transitions between the electronic bands of the material. This finding changes the conventional perspective on light-solid interaction, especially in extreme conditions where ultrafast changes were previously attributed solely to the motion of actual (real) charges.

Matteo Lucchini, a professor in the Physics Department, lead author of the study, and CNR-Ifn fellow, stated: "Our work shows that the virtual carrier excitation, which evolves in a few billionths of a billionth of a second, is essential to correctly predict the ultrafast optical response in solids."

Rocío Borrego-Varillas, a researcher at the New England Institute's National Centre for Nuclear Research (name may be an abbreviation or part of a longer name), added: "These results represent a major step in the development of ultrafast technologies in the field of electronics."

New Insights for PetaHertz Devices:

This scientific breakthrough provides new insights for innovating ultrafast optical devices, such as switches and modulators capable of operating at PetaHertz (PHz) frequencies—a thousand times faster than existing electronic devices. Achieving this speed requires a profound understanding of the behavior of both real and virtual charges, as this study has successfully demonstrated.