Nanoelectronics Accomplishments
The Nanoelectronics program has overcome some of the major challenges of designing, creating and manipulating materials on a tiny scale.- CIFAR researchers lead the world in developing “photonic band gap materials,” which are crystalline structures that trap, guide and control particles of light. The telecommunications industry currently uses photonic signals to transmit information down fibre-optic cables. But impurities in optical fibres can cause signals to degrade, making transmissions less efficient. CIFAR researchers and their international collaborators were the first to discover and produce a photonic crystal material able to manipulate and transmit light precisely and efficiently.
- They also created a photonic crystal architecture that weighs less and is able to trap light longer, making it suitable for boosting the efficiency of solar cells.
- Program members are working to control better the currents running through computers, which transfer of millions of kilobytes of data per second. This work exploits the small electric fields that single molecules emit. Such fields affect proximate atoms and molecules but are effectively invisible beyond that. This work is helping to create whole new architectures for processing information.
