Nanowerk
Light reprograms tiny metasurface for adaptive optical computing
For example, every time you ask a large language model such as ChatGPT or Claude a question, many electrical signals race through computer chips, carrying information and performing calculations. This takes energy, and lots of it.
One possible solution is to replace some electrical signals with light. When a laser was shone on the device, it rotated the liquid crystal molecules and changed the way the surface interacted with light. Lead researcher Ziwei Yang says the response or function of a static metasurface cannot be changed after fabrication.
“But by shining light on the liquid crystal, we have another way to tune that function without fabricating the device again.”
A road system
The device is a metasurface, which is a thin material covered with structures smaller than the width of a human hair.
These tiny structures…
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