It’s a bright day for computing — literally.
Two tech companies have unveiled computer components that use laser light to process information. These futuristic processors could soon solve specific real-world problems faster and with lower energy requirements than conventional computers. The announcements, published separately April 9 in Nature, mark a major leap forward for this alternative approach to computing.
Lightelligence, based in Boston, and Lightmatter, in Mountain View, Calif., have shown that light-based, or photonic, components “can do things that we care about, and that they can do them better than electronic chips that we already have,” says Anthony Rizzo, a photonics engineer at Dartmouth College who was not