Recently, a researcher at the University of Rochester in the United States successfully predicted that the green laser pointer pulse can generate ultra-fast current at the nanometer scale, which marks a new field of controlling electrons using the green laser pointer.
“You won’t use it to make a car, but you can generate electricity faster than before. You will be able to develop a billionth of a meter (nanoscale) electronic circuit with a working time of one billion. One second (femtoseconds). But more importantly, this is a good example of how different substances behave in the absence of equilibrium. The laser violently shakes the nodes of the nanostructures. Thus completely changing its nature. This means that we can use light to regulate the properties of matter,” said assistant professor Ignacio Franco.
As early as 2007, Franco published a paper in the Physical Review Letter as the lead author, saying that in the molecular wires of the femtosecond green laser pointer, extremely powerful ultra-fast currents can be generated. A molecular line is a linear carbon chain that can be attached to a metal contact to form a nanoscale junction. The current is generated by the Stark effect. In this case, due to the external electric field of the laser, the energy level of the substance changes, which can be used to control the energy level arrangement between the molecules and the metal contacts. . But because the experiment could not be used to create such a small connection point and record what happened before the laser destroyed the wire, the theory stopped at that time.
In 2013, a team led by Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics produced ultra-high-speed currents by connecting different nanoglasses to two gold electrodes and then exposing them to laser pulses. However, the specific dynamic mechanism of this phenomenon is not clear.
At present, researchers have repeatedly proposed different mechanism assumptions. Even if the materials are different, Franco believes that the same Stark effect mechanism is working. So they used a supercomputer for simulation experiments, which finally confirmed this in 4 years.
The research results have been published in Nature Newsletter.