Nanotechnology Now - News Story: "Metactronics - a metamaterial-inspired nanotechnology approach towards electronics"

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October 16th, 2007

Metactronics - a metamaterial-inspired nanotechnology approach towards electronics

Abstract:
Nanoelectronics deals with functional electron devices, such as transistors, in the nanoscale range size. As the name implies, nanoelectronics runs on electricity, i.e. the transport of electrons. Another approach to creating faster,smaller and more energy-efficient electronics is to move the field of optical information processing towards the nanoscale. Optical nanoelectronics will work with light instead of electron transport. Here the usual circuit elements such as inductors, capacitors and resistors could be created in order to operate using infrared or visible light. Using nanotechnology, researchers are able to create structures that could operate on the same or smaller scale as the wavelength of light (the wavelength of visible light is roughly between 400 and 700 nanometers). Going beyond 'conventional' nanoelectronics, researchers have now proposed a form of optical circuitry in which a network of subwavelength nanoscale metamaterial structures and nanoparticles may provide a mechanism for tailoring, patterning, and manipulating optical electric fields in a subwavelength domain, leading to the possibility of optical information processing at the nanometer scale.

Source:
nanowerk.com

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