[HN Gopher] Opening the gate to electromagnonics information pro...
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       Opening the gate to electromagnonics information processing
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2021-07-18 11:18 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.uchicago.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.uchicago.edu)
        
       | justicezyx wrote:
       | I cannot seem connect the device and its effect with information
       | processing? The device does not seem able to simulate gates in
       | modern large scale circuit, right?
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | Seems like the gate is electronic:
         | 
         | >"We start by tuning the photon and magnon with an electric
         | pulse so that they have the same energy level," said Zhang.
         | "Then, the information exchange starts between them and
         | continues until the electric pulse is turned off, which shifts
         | the energy level of the magnon away from that of the photon."
         | 
         | It seems like more of a mechanism to use this as a bridge
         | between two media types and this is a mechanism to control it
         | at a much higher bandwidth than the previous mechanism which:
         | 
         | >However, such tuning has depended on changing the geometric
         | configuration of the device. That typically requires much
         | longer than the magnon lifetime--on the order of 100
         | nanoseconds (one-hundred billionths of a second). This lack of
         | a rapid tuning mechanism for interacting magnons and photons
         | has made it impossible to achieve any real-time gating control.
        
         | wallacoloo wrote:
         | It looks to be a transmission gate (a controlled switch). It's
         | analogous to a N-type MOSFET. If they can create an additional
         | transmission gate that couples the inputs only when the gate
         | pulse _isn't_ present, then they've achieved similar to a
         | P-type MOSFET, and they could implement logic in almost the
         | same way CMOS does.
         | 
         | It would be helpful if the article gave at least some basic
         | information about the device physics.
        
       | rohanphadte wrote:
       | A few highlights from the technical article:
       | 
       | > Their pivotal discovery allows real-time control of information
       | transfer between microwave photons and magnons.
       | 
       | > Wireless communications use microwave photons are elementary
       | particles that form electromagnetic waves. Meanwhile, another
       | concept called "magnons" can also carry information. Magnons are
       | wave-like disturbances in an ordered array of microscopically
       | aligned spins that occur in certain magnetic materials.
       | 
       | > Using a novel method involving energy-level tuning, the team
       | was able to rapidly switch between magnonic and photonic states
       | over a period shorter than the magnon or photon lifetimes. This
       | period is a mere 10 to 100 nanoseconds.
       | 
       | > And it could result in a new generation of classical electronic
       | and quantum signal devices that can be used in various
       | applications such as signal switching, low-power computing and
       | quantum networking.
        
       | escape_goat wrote:
       | Here's the original article published by Argonne National
       | Laboratory: https://www.anl.gov/article/opening-the-gate-to-the-
       | next-gen...
       | 
       | Here's the paper in Physical Review Letters:
       | https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
        
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