Could our mobile phones and internet data operate using light rather than just electricity in the future? An international research team, led by CNRS researchers at the Albert Fert Laboratory, has discovered how to generate an electron gas found in LED screens by illuminating a material made up of layers of oxides for the first time.
These gases, occurring naturally in certain semiconductor materials, were previously only manipulated using electrical signals in oxidized materials. When the light is switched off, the gas disappears.
This phenomenon, at the crossroads of optics and electronics, opens up numerous applications in electronics, spintronics, and quantum computing. The research is detailed in Nature Materials.
Electronic components controlled by light rather than electricity offer the advantage of being faster, more energy-efficient, and easier to operate. For instance, light-controlled transistors could eliminate up to one-third of the electrical contacts on a chip, potentially saving a significant number of electrical contacts on a computer processor alone.
This breakthrough was made possible by combining advanced experiments with theoretical calculations. The arrangement of atoms at the interface between the two oxide layers was precisely calibrated, and observations at the atomic scale were utilized to understand the behavior of the atoms and model their electron motion when exposed to light stimuli.
The research also involved scientists from the Strasbourg Institute of Materials Physics and Chemistry and the Solid State Physics Laboratory.
