Breaking barriers with nanoscale lasers(wn that this limit to the size of nanola...)

Nanoscale lasers can also be integrated with other biomedical diagnostic tools, making them work faster and more efficiently, he says.

These advances also represent a major step in nanophotonics the study of the behavior of light on the nanometer scale and the ability to fabricate devices in nanoscale.

"Nanolasers can be used for many applications, but the most exciting possibilities are for communications on a central processing unit (CPU) of a computer chip," Ning says.

As computers get faster, the communication between different parts in a computer creates a processing bottleneck, he explains.

Since a signal can be transmitted between computer components much faster by a light wave emitted by a laser than by metal wires, optical communication (communication using light) is "the ultimate solution for improving on semiconductor chip communications," Ning says.

"But before this becomes a reality, lasers have to be made small enough to be integrated with small electronics components," he says. "This is why the Department of Defense and chip manufacturers such as Intel are working on optical solutions for on-chip communications."

Research in this field in the United States is being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense. The agency is supporting a collaborative team partnering researchers at ASU, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

ASU's collaboration with Hill's team at Eindhoven happened by coincidence, Ning says.

"We discovered we were working on the same problems and trying to achi
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