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Bendable Light

Getting the Skinny on TV

Radioactive Wall Crawler

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Bendable Light

Light could be better than electricity to make a computer run faster and more efficiently, but light is also much more difficult to control. Engineers have long lusted after a material that could manipulate light the way silicon chips organize electricity. "The problem is that light propagates too easily," says Sajeev John, a physicist at the University of Toronto. 
 

Your next computer might contain this unlikely mix of silicon, liquid crystals and air.

Courtesy Sajeev John and Kurt Busch

But he and his colleagues say they have found a solution. They poured silicon into a tray full of glass balls and used acid to dissolve the balls, leaving an array of spherical holes. Then they coated the holes in liquid crystals, whose light-scattering properties change in the presence of an electric field. The resulting structure should allow the scientists to control the path of light and to reprogram it at will. John hopes to use this material as the basis for light-powered computers, which he believes could be on the market within a decade.

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