New Material Could Make for Terahertz-Speed Optical Switching

by Alexander Hellemans IEEE Spectrum Online, 23 Mar 2005 Light may move fast, but it generally takes its time to change a material's electrical properties. But now a Franco-Japanese team has turned an insulator into a conductor in just 2 picoseconds, a 50-fold speedup that should catapult optical switching from the gigahertz to the terahertz range. Read the article