Mohammed Hassan's Research Featured on "Science Advances" Cover

Assistant Professor Mohammed Hassan's work on optical switching has achieved previously unattainable data transfer speeds hitting the attosecond level, a quintillionth of a second. The article was featured on the cover of the February issue of Science Advances. Additionally, the story was featured by UANews in the article "Optical switching at record speeds opens door for ultrafast, light-based electronics and computers." Read the UANews Article.

The article "Ultrafast optical switching and data encoding on synthesized light fields" published by Mohammed and co-authors, Hui, Alqattan, Zhang, Pervak, and Chowdhury states the impact of the work saying, "This work paves the way for establishing optical switches and light-based electronics with petahertz speeds, several orders of magnitude faster than the current semiconductor-based electronics, opening a new realm in information technology, optical communications, and photonic processor technologies." Read the Science Advances article.

Mohammed says of the research, "This new advancement would also allow the encoding of data on ultrafast laser pulses, which would increase the data transfer speed and could be used in long-distance communications from Earth into deep space. This promises to increase the limiting speed of data processing and information encoding and open a new realm of information technology."

The research is also now featured in a short, educational video about attosecond Optical Switching. Watch it below.