Subscribe to one of our news e-mail lists . Pairs of so-called entangled photons possess esoteric characteristics that could allow manufacturers to produce far superior computer chips than current technology allows, said a team of international researchers. Dowling and colleagues from JPL and the University of Wales in the U.K. published a paper on their findings Tuesday in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Technicians use streams of laser light particles to sculpt transistor components on computer chips.
The smaller the transistors, the more they can be squeezed on a chip and the faster the chip operates. The most modern chips have transistors as small as 180 nanometers, more than 400 times narrower than the width of a human hair. But chip manufacturers should not be able to produce features smaller than 124 nanometers, according to a main principal of optics known as Rayleigh criterion. Theoretically, entangled light particles would bypass the physical constraint and work twice as efficiently as conventional laser beams and produce transistors as small as 64 nanometers. A pair of entangled photons would travel together and behave as a single unit when aimed at two possible paths.