All Optical Control of Magnetization

All-Optical reconfigurable information processing:
The team of MicroXact, Inc., UCLA, UC Irvine and Carnegie Mellon University is engineering revolutionary, nonvolatile reconfigurable plasmonic gates for information processing on the basis of ultrafast plasmon-enhanced all-optical magnetization switching. This unique approach allows one to program any gate between several different states at very high modulation rates and low power consumption, thus allowing tremendous opportunities to engineer all-optical Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Gates modulation is nonvolatile and one can use the proposed solution to build reconfigurable memory arrays. The proposed reconfigurable gates, will enable optical information processing engines with unmatched speed, functionality, integration density, and low power dissipation.

The project to date resulted in a number of scientific and technological breakthroughs including development of theoretical understanding and experimental demonstration of ultrafast all-optical magnetization reversal in multisublattice magnetic materials with plasmonic nanostructures.