What is it about?
When you turn on a switch at home you are pushing together two solid, metal conducting wires. In this way, they conduct electricity and your appliance, your light, turns on. Here we saw that a very short laser pulse could turn some salty water samples into good conductors at terahertz frequencies, for a very short time.
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Photo by Geoffrey Crofte on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our computers, smartphones, and wireless communications typically operate in the gigahertz range. One terahertz is 1000x larger than one gigahertz. For this reason, there is interest in developing new devices that operate at terahertz frequencies, because they could be 1000x faster than the ones we have now.
Perspectives
This is the first experiment of its kind, demonstrating that salty water can be a good electrical conductor at terahertz frequencies, if only for an instant. I am thrilled by the possibility that this work might open new research venues and maybe even new water-based technologies. There is this old movie, The Abyss, where an advanced alien race lives at the bottom of the ocean. At some point, the aliens use a “water robot” as a probe. “Their technology is based on water,” says the scientist later on in the movie, if I remember right. This is the far-reaching dream I have, that this work could be the spark that light a new technology. Coming down to earth, I think that this work could be relevant for all the colleagues that work with similar experiments. These salty water samples could be used as benchmark, or to control the terahertz frequency. The next step we are thinking about is to build a new detector based on this effect, where a salty liquid replaces a solid semiconductor.
Fabio Novelli
Ruhr University Bochum
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An ultra-fast liquid switch for terahertz radiation, APL Photonics, December 2022, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0130236.
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