optique

Two research groups at ETH Zurich have joined forces to develop a novel light detector. It consists of two-dimensional layers of different materials that are coupled to a silicon optical waveguide. In the future, this approach can also be used to make LEDs and optical modulators.

Chemical reactions are determined at their most fundamental level by their respective electronic structure and dynamics. Steered by a stimulus such as light irradiation, electrons rearrange themselves in liquids or solids. This process takes only a few hundred attoseconds, whereby one attosecond is the billionth part of a billionth of a second.