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American scientists create innovative semiconductor with the potential to make silicon obsolete in modern computing.
In today's world of technology, semiconductors are crucial elements, with silicon occupying a prominent position in this category. However, despite its predominance, silicon is not necessarily the ideal semiconductor. One of the main limitations of silicon is its tendency to generate a lot of heat, resulting in significant energy loss. This thermal challenge imposes the need for higher capacity batteries for mobile devices, directly affecting the energy efficiency of these devices and it was with this in mind that scientists are working on what appears to be the fastest new semiconductor in the world.
The world's fastest semiconductor is discovered and could change the computing sector
The atomic structure of every material vibrates, generating phonons – quantum particles responsible for conducting sound and heat. These vibrations cause the scattering of electrons or electron-hole pairs, known as excitons, which are crucial for the transport of energy and information in electronic circuits.
Typically, this dispersion results in energy loss in the form of heat and imposes a limit on data transfer speed. However, Jakhangirkhodja Tulyagankhodjaev and his team at Columbia University in the US have made a remarkable discovery by developing a new semiconductor that outperforms silicon and features exceptional efficiency and speed, paving the way for significant advances in computing.
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The innovative material, called Re6Se8Cl2, is a super atom formed by rhenium, selenium and chlorine. Superatoms are sets of atoms that behave like a single large atom, but with different properties from the elements that compose them. A notable feature of this new semiconductor is the way excitons interact with phonons.
Instead of dispersing, they couple with phonons, forming quasiparticles known as acoustic exciton polarons. These polarons, discovered in various materials since their first observation in 2016, have a special feature in the new material: the ability to realize ballistic or dispersion-free flows, representing a significant leap in the efficiency and performance of semiconductors.
Data obtained from scientists' experiments with the new semiconductor
The aforementioned ballistic behavior means that if the material can make it all the way to industrial-scale applications, it will be possible to produce electronic circuits that are much faster and more energy efficient than anything available in computing today.
In experiments carried out by the team, acoustic exciton-polarons in the new semiconductor moved twice as fast as electrons in silicon and crossed several micrometers of the sample in less than a nanosecond.
Given that polarons can last about 11 nanoseconds, the team believes that exciton-polarons can cover more than 25 micrometers in just one pulse.
Because these quasiparticles are controlled by pulses of light rather than an electrical current, processing speeds in theoretical devices have the potential to reach femtoseconds, which is six orders of magnitude faster than the nanoseconds achievable in current technology. computing. All at room temperature.
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The new quasiparticles are fast, however, counterintuitively, they reach this speed because, by themselves, they move very slowly, a bit like the story of the tortoise and the hare, in which persistence overcomes sprint speed.
What makes silicon a desirable semiconductor is that electrons can move through it quickly, but they bounce around too much and don't actually get very far or very quickly in the end.
The excitons in the new semiconductor, in turn, are Latvian, but reach much further. Despite everything, it is unlikely that this will reach the computing sector, given that rhenium, the first element in the molecule, is one of the rarest on Earth and, as a result, extremely expensive.
Source: Tecnologic innovation
