
What's after electrical charges and electricity in computer storage? Lasers and excitons. Theorists from the John Hopkins University have drafted a theory that uses low-power lasers and crystalline insulators to store data. In the theory, lasers would excite electrons in a crystalline-like lattice in order to record data; the atoms would vibrate at a certain frequency to indicate the type of bit. A side effect of using lasers and insulators is reduced heat output. The heat is reduced because the atoms do not exchanging electrons as current computer components do. The
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Member since:
2005-07-01
This is very nice, I'm sure for certain high-end, memory intensive supercomputing applications, but here on my desktop, the thing what's making all the heat is the CPU, not the RAM.
Whenever I read this stuff, I find it hard to get interested, knowing that I'm never really going to understand it and probably won't see anything come of it for the best part of a decade, if ever. It all sounds great, I just don't know what to do with this information.