Towards femtosecond on-chip electronics
Abstract
To combine the advantages of ultrafast femtosecond optics with an on-chip communcation scheme, optical signals with a frequency of several hundreds of THz need to be down-converted to coherent electronic signals of GHz or less. So far, this has not been achieved because of the impedance mismatch within electronic circuits and their overall slow response-time. Here, we demonstrate that 14 fs optical pulses in the near-infrared (NIR) can drive electronic on-chip circuits with a bandwidth up to 10 THz. The corresponding electronic pulses propagate in microscopic striplines on a millimeter scale. We exploit femtosecond photoswitches based on tunneling barriers in nanoscale metal junctions to drive the pulses. The non-linear ultrafast response is based on a combination of plasmonically enhanced, multi-photon absorption and quantum tunneling, and gives rise to a field emission of ballistic electrons propagating across the nanoscale junctions. Our results pave the way towards femtosecond electronics integrated in waferscale quantum circuits.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1708.00262,
title = {Towards femtosecond on-chip electronics},
author = {Christopher Karnetzky and Philipp Zimmermann and Christopher Trummer and Carolina Duque-Sierra and Martin Wörle and Reinhard Kienberger and Alexander Holleitner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.00262},
year = {2017}
}