PLASMONICS

PLASMONICS With increasing quest for transporting large amounts of data at a fast speed along with miniaturization, both electronics and photonics are facing limitations. photonic components such as fiber-optic cables can carry a lot of data but are bulky compared to electronic circuits. Electronic components such as wires and transistors can be incredibly small but carry less data. A problem holding back the progress of computing is that with mismatched capacities and sizes, the two technologies are hard to combine in a circuit. Photonic components such as fiber optic cables can carry a lot of data but are bulky compared to electronic circuits. Electronic components such as wires and transistors carry less data but can be incredibly small. Researchers can cobble them together, but single technology that has the capacity of photonic and smallness of electronics would be the best bridge of all. Researchers are pioneering such a technology called ''plasmonics''. Plasmonics, also called ''light on a wire'', would allow transmission of data at optical frequencies along the surface of a tiny metallic wire, despite the fact the data travels in the form of electron density distributions rather than photons.