Is Photonics the Future of Computing?

[foges]

So I'm applying to graduate school and have taken an interest in Photonics, but I'm not really sure of where photonics is really headed, the reason i bring this up is:

-When talking to my communication electronics professor he mentioned that photonics was something everyone thought was going to take of, but never really did
-I am doing some lab work in a clean room producing Photonic crystals and the PhD student I am working for said that it turns out photonic crystals arn't really what everyone had hoped
- When googleing (integrated circuit) photonics most of the papers I have been able to find are from 2007-2006 and before
- Photon photon interaction is impossible which requires photon electron interaction, which requires quite a bit of energy, close to that generated by losses in electronics


Now surely photonics is great for longer distance communication and lasers may have some very useful applications in things like bio-medicine, but what about photonics within a computer?

Thanks
PS: I mean no offense to photonics specialists, just want to know kind of what the general consensus is..

 

[Algr]

Not really an answer, but might be relevant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Peak

 

[josh_einsle]

photon- photon may be out, but photon-plasmon are one area that shows some promise for optical computing. I was at a photonics conference last Easter and the conference organizer pointed out that he thought much of the research would start heading into the plasmonics side as building plasmonic devices looks more tractable. This was all good for me since I was speaking on plasmonics anyway.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Now surely photonics is great for longer distance communication and lasers may have some very useful applications in things like bio-medicine, but what about photonics within a computer?

3-D photonic crystals, as a mass-produced technological device for visible or near IR light, are a long way off- probably decades. However, 1-D photonic crystals are currently pseudo-mass produced and are finding a lot of applications:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber

Photonics means pretty much anything that controls the propagation of light. So, there's things like metamaterials (not just photonic bandgaps, it's more general and includes negative refractive index materials), diffractionless beams (Bessel beams), short pulse generation, nonlinear optics, etc. etc.

As far as photonics in computers, there's efforts to integrate lasers directly onto chips (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_silicon_laser), there's new classes of lasers (nanolasers, whispering-mode lasers), and displays (organic semiconductor lasers).