Volker Sorger and His Co-Authors Recently Published the Following Article: “Fundamental Scaling Laws in Nanophotonics”

Professor Volker Sorger and his co-authors recently published the following article: K. Liu, S. Sun, A. Majumdar, and V. J. Sorger. “Fundamental Scaling Laws in Nanophotonics,” Nature’s Scientific Reports, 6, 37419; DOI: 10.1038/srep37419 (2016).  The article answers the long-standing question of whether scaling (shrinking) opto-electronic devices such as lasers, detectors, and modulators benefits these devices at the same level as scaling transistors does.  Intel has been shrinking transistors over the last 50 years, and until now it was not clear whether scaling has the same benefits for photonics.  The published results show that the performance of photonic devices scale non-monotonically, but that scaling can improve performance by several orders of magnitude compared to current technology.  The results provide a detailed understanding of the limits of nanophotonics, which may help establish an opto-electronics roadmap, akin to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors.