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Scientists Discover "Gyromorphs" Materials to Enhance Light-Based Computers

shevy-java 1y ago
I like the name gyromorphs. Now, this name tells me absolutely nothing, but it's pretty cool - even more when it focuses on "light-based computers". Glass fibers changed the world. It makes sense to push computers towards that too, not only quantum computers but all kinds of information-based computer systems. We have a lot of untapped potential everywhere here, including data storage. Right now I have a 2TB harddisc. I want a tiny harddisc but with, say, 100TB, and at an affordable cost. Go nanotech, go! Make it happen already.
- moi2388 1y ago
  I hope this makes laptops ‘lighter’ /s
  - dhosek 1y ago
    And thinner too.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
My favorite part about these class of materials is that the computational cost to design them is so high. We finally have computers powerful enough to design optical metamaterials with enough precision that they are a reasonably affordable thing to make (each real experiment in making these is on the order of $100,000, and the design space is so large >10^10 that we could never reconcile the two without in-silicon experiments).
gabia 1y ago
https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
meindnoch 1y ago
Isn't optical computing basically a scam? To achieve the same circuit density that we currently have with semiconductors, they would have to operate on photons with ~1nm wavelength, which is in the X-ray range.
- adastra22 1y ago
  “2nm” transistors aren’t actually 2nm.
  - meindnoch 1y ago
    I didn't mention transistors. The de Broglie wavelength of an electron is 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of a photon of the same energy. Period.
- watersb 1y ago
  The wavelength of an electron may be way smaller than the wavelength of a photon at the same energy... But do photons take up as much room as equivalent electrons? Seems like there's lots of tricks you can play, and we don't really know them all yet.
gsf_emergency_4 1y ago
Gyromorphs seem to be Fourier transforms of quasicrystals.. if that makes them less mysterious [fig 2a] panels show near-perfect agreement between the real (resp. reciprocal) features of gyromorphs and the reciprocal (resp. real) features of quasicrystals. https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1 Another paper of the week on experimentally discovering quasicrystals (& now, also gyromorphs https://arxiv.org/html/2506.18473v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2506.18473v2

I like the name gyromorphs. Now, this name tells me absolutely nothing, but it's pretty cool - even more when it focuses on "light-based computers". Glass fibers changed the world. It makes sense to push computers towards that too, not only quantum computers but all kinds of information-based computer systems. We have a lot of untapped potential everywhere here, including data storage. Right now I have a 2TB harddisc. I want a tiny harddisc but with, say, 100TB, and at an affordable cost. Go nanotech, go! Make it happen already.

moi2388 1y ago
I hope this makes laptops ‘lighter’ /s
- dhosek 1y ago
  And thinner too.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

My favorite part about these class of materials is that the computational cost to design them is so high. We finally have computers powerful enough to design optical metamaterials with enough precision that they are a reasonably affordable thing to make (each real experiment in making these is on the order of $100,000, and the design space is so large >10^10 that we could never reconcile the two without in-silicon experiments).

gabia 1y ago

https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

meindnoch 1y ago

Isn't optical computing basically a scam? To achieve the same circuit density that we currently have with semiconductors, they would have to operate on photons with ~1nm wavelength, which is in the X-ray range.

adastra22 1y ago
“2nm” transistors aren’t actually 2nm.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  I didn't mention transistors. The de Broglie wavelength of an electron is 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of a photon of the same energy. Period.
watersb 1y ago
The wavelength of an electron may be way smaller than the wavelength of a photon at the same energy... But do photons take up as much room as equivalent electrons? Seems like there's lots of tricks you can play, and we don't really know them all yet.

gsf_emergency_4 1y ago

Gyromorphs seem to be Fourier transforms of quasicrystals.. if that makes them less mysterious [fig 2a] panels show near-perfect agreement between the real (resp. reciprocal) features of gyromorphs and the reciprocal (resp. real) features of quasicrystals. https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1 Another paper of the week on experimentally discovering quasicrystals (& now, also gyromorphs https://arxiv.org/html/2506.18473v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2506.18473v2