Researchers in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics) (RLE) including lead authors Postdocs Peter Rakich and Milos Popovic and coauthors Marin Soljacic, assistant professor of physics, and Erich Ippen, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of physics, have developed a new theory showing that microchips can be powered by the light they were designed to manipulate--instead of by electricity--thereby advancing telecommunications, spectroscopy and sensing.

The mechanism by which light is manipulated, as described in the cover story of the November issue of Nature Photonics, will be accomplished by adapting the microchip with tiny mobile machines. These will be driven in the micro environment of the chip by the forces of the photons as they strike the walls of the specially designed cavity. This work has followed the development by members of the same research team in early 2007 of optics on a chip, integrating photonic circuitry on a silicon chip.

As reported in the MIT News Office article, dated November 1, 2007, Peter Rakich stated, "There are thousands of complex functions we could make happen by tinkering with this idea."

In addition, Prof. Ippen said, "The idea that opto-nanomechanical devices can be designed to self-adapt to all-optical control--i.e., by self-aligning their resonances to optical control frequencies and by permitting all-optical tuning and dimension control--is new and exciting."

The goal of the lab, explained Popovic, "is to develop a variety of light-powered micro- and nanomachines with unique capabilities enabled by this technology." In the immediate future the researchers need to demonstrate some specific applications such as processing data that travels in fiber-optic networks.

See the cover article in Nature Photonics, titled: "Trapping, corralling and spectral bonding of optical resonances through optically induced potentials."

The research work was funded in part by the Army Research Office through MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.