In the November 10 2023 issue of the journal Science researchers report on a new type of semiconductor that is one million times faster than any found before and does so at room temperature; it's a compound of Rhenium Chlorine and Selenium (Re6Se8Cl2), if entire chips could be made of this substance they could make a calculation in the femtosecond range (10^-15 of a second) instead of the gigahertz range (10^-9 of a second) as silicon does.
Room-temperature wavelike exciton transport in a van der Waals superatomic semiconductor <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf2698> Until now the transport of information in all semiconductors, silicon including, is limited by scattering between electrons and lattice quantum vibrations called "phonons" that results in the electrons losing energy and wasting their time by bouncing around and traveling in a very indirect route to the target. Thanks to a new phenomenon never observed before, the electrons in Re6Se8Cl2 move directly towards their target without losing energy or time. Unfortunately it's unlikely that chip Industry will abandon silicon and turn to it because Rhenium is rare and expensive, about $3000 a kilogram and only about 50 tons are refined a year, but now that researchers know what to look for they will almost certainly find other materials that make use of the same new phenomenon. Of course even if a cheap material could be found it would still be a challenge to make advanced computer chips out of it because we couldn't make use of 50 the years of experience we have in working with silicon so we'd be starting from scratch, but if it's 1 million times faster it would be worth it. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> iww -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0PVDC4VBLoCOiNKrVjCH6PmbY96yPNH_Ph5NOVNdZ6aQ%40mail.gmail.com.
