False-colour scanning electron micrograph of a nanowire strain device. Very tiny wires made of semiconducting materials – more than one thousand times thinner than a human hair – promise to be an essential component for the semiconductor industry. Thanks to these tiny nanostructures, scientists envision not only a more powerful new generation of transistors, but also to integrate optical communication systems within the very same piece of silicon. This would make possible data transfer between chips at the speed of light. But for optical communication to happen, it is essential to convert the electrical information used in the microprocessor into light, by using light emitters. On the other end of the optical link, one needs to translate the information contained in the stream of light into electrical signals by using light detectors. Current technologies use different materials to realize these two distinct functions – silicon or germanium for light detection and materials combining elements from the III-V columns of the periodic table for light emission. However, this might be going to change soon thanks to a new discovery. In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, scientists at IBM Research – Zurich and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have
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