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Efficient light-emitting silicon material

11.04.2020

Scientists have long sought to create efficient light-emitting devices based on silicon. Their use could significantly increase the speed of computing on silicon chips and make them faster than ever. Materials scientists from the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Technical University of Munich and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena have finally succeeded in achieving this. They were able to synthesize a silicon-based material that is capable of emitting light over a wide range of wavelengths, depending on its composition.

The researchers used silicon and germanium as initial reagents. They combined both elements into a hexagonal structure and learned how to change its properties by varying the composition. Getting these two elements to form a hexagonal lattice together is not easy. To do this, the researchers took pure hexagonal silicon as a basis, creating nanowires from another material with a hexagonal crystal structure. They then grew a silicon-germanium shell from this pattern.

Scientists achieved the formation of such a structure back in 2015. But so far they have not been able to make it emit light. In the new work, the authors succeeded in improving the quality of hexagonal silicon-germanium shells by reducing the amount of impurities and defects in their crystal lattices. By excitating such a nanowire with a laser, the researchers were able to measure the effectiveness of the new material. It turned out that the efficiency of absorption and subsequent emission of radiation in the new material is at a very high level. Now scientists are planning to create a laser based on it and try to use the new material in chips.

The relevance of the new work is due to the ever-increasing amount of data that humanity has to store and process. The current technologies based on electronic chips are reaching their ceiling. The limiting factor is the heat that is generated due to the resistance of the materials. To avoid this, it is necessary to create a technology that does not release heat into the environment. A promising candidate for this role could be photonics, a type of technology that uses light to transmit information and compute.

Unlike electrons, photons have no resistance. They have no mass or charge, so will dissipate less within the material they pass through and generate little to no stray heat. In addition, if we replace electrons with photons in the data transmission and processing chain, we can increase the speed of such computing mechanisms by 1000 times.

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Light-eating cyborg bacteria 26.08.2017

Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley, USA, have created bacteria that feed on light and contain semiconductor nanocrystals. Cyborg microbes can synthesize various organic compounds, doing it more efficiently than in the process of photosynthesis.

The non-photosynthetic bacteria Moorella thermoacetica, which produce acetic acid from carbon dioxide during respiration, were used in the experiment. The scientists added cadmium and the amino acid cysteine, which contains a sulfur atom, to the nutrient medium on which the microorganisms grew. As a result, cadmium sulfide nanoparticles were formed, functioning as microscopic solar cells.

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