Computing With Light, Rather Than Electricity...

...will make computers about 100 times faster, even faster than Netscape.

"You think your sleek new laptop is fast? A slow-footed plow horse compared to what Ritesh Agarwal has in mind. Rather than perform computations by manipulating the flow of electricity, he wants to manipulate the flow of light - outstripping the speeds of today's computers by a factor of at least 100, by his estimate.

In a recent study, Agarwal and colleague Brian Piccione reported that they had induced the slender wires to act as switches - clamping down on the flow of the light through a given wire by hitting it with another laser.

That's what a computer is, after all: a dizzying array of on-and-off switches, combined in such a way as to allow the sending of e-mail or predicting the next hurricane.

In their study, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, Agarwal, Piccione, and coauthors described how they had combined several of their microscopic light-activated switches to make a logic "gate." A gate is the basic computational unit of a computer - sort of an electronic version of a fork in the road, in which two conditions must be met in order for the signal to go forward.