"FASTER, faster," goes the eternal cry of the impatient computer
user. In a world dominated by the processor, speed is
everything. To feed our addiction for powerful computers, design
engineers are resorting to all manner of exotic solutions:
manipulating the quirks of quantum mechanics, sending data along
twinkling beams of laser light, or even using chips cooled to
near absolute zero. But the latest idea for opening up the data
throttle uses a trick that nobody has considered till now: doing
away with currents of electrons inside computer chips, and
making waves instead. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
in New York, the physicist Michael Shur is leading a team of
researchers investigating this idea. Their aim is to build tiny
components that will handle electrical signals with frequencies
in the terahertz (10 To continue reading this article, subscribe
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