Researchers try out terahertz electrical switch using magnetite material

Today's widely used and popular nanoscale switch, the silicon MOSFET transistor, what we find in Ultra integrated VLSI chips can switch at speeds of 10s gigahertz, speed can be pushed further by using high electron mobility compound semiconductor material. But the researchers U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory go for a big jump in switching speeds by able to use magnetic material called magnetite as an electric switch at the frequencies in terahertz range, thousand times higher than today's switching in any of the semiconductor material. Scientists have used SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser to switch from on to off in 1 trillionth of a second in samples of magnetite. "This breakthrough research reveals for the first time the 'speed limit' for electrical switching in this material," said Roopali Kukreja, a materials science researcher at SLAC and Stanford University who is a lead author of the study. Scientists could able to see how the electronic structure of magnetite sample rearranged into conducting and nonconducting regions, which formed in just hundreds of quadrillionths of second. They could see how a conducting and nonconducting states coexist in the material to create electrical pathways in high-speed chips which can be used to process high definition video thousand times faster than the present VLSI chi...