Tracking light in, essentially, a tiny pinball machine

Ars Technica writes, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology If you want to communicate a lot of information very fast and in a very short time, then you have to use light. Indeed, modern communications relies on this. Yet, communications of the very small scale still rely on passing currents along wires. The wires connecting transistors on a chip consume a significant amount of power, and generate a significant amount of heat. So it's slow, and wasteful—a happy combination to make any engineer leap with joy. We would love to convert to optical interconnects, both on-chip, and between chips, but the technology just...

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