Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. Although scientifically intriguing, the results won’t immediately result in ultra-efficient commercial LEDs since the demonstration works only for LEDs with very low input power that produce very small amounts of light.

Silicon is a unique material that has revolutionized electronics; it enables engineers to put millions of electrical devices onto a single chip. Replacing the electrical currents in this technology with beams of light could enable even faster information processing. Qian Wang at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers1 have now designed a crucial component for such optical chips — a connector that links the silicon chip to an optical fiber.

The properties of a material are greatly affected by the electrical and magnetic structure of its constituent ions and electrons. In a ferromagnet, for example, neighboring electron spins point in the same direction, producing a strong external magnetic field