Controlling current on the nanoscale

Although they measure a mere 50 nanometres across, gates that control the currents running through our computers are able to direct the transfer of millions of kilobytes of data per second.

“But imagine how fast this transfer would be if we could control current on the scale one nanometer instead,” says George Kirczenow, a theoretical physicist and member of CIFAR’s Nanoelectronics program.

Dr. Kirczenow, postdoctoral fellow Paul Piva and fellow program member Bob Wolkow used theory and experiment to prove that controlling current through individual molecules is feasible. This work opens the door to creating whole new architectures for processing information.

Their approach exploits the small electric fields that single molecules naturally emit. Such fields are felt by atoms and molecules positioned nearby, within a nanometer, but are effectively invisible beyond that. This ensures that the pathways currents of information travel are very tightly, locally defined, which enables higher density, faster operation.

This story relates to our research program: Nanoelectronics