What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off. A new class of synthetic materials could herald the next revolution of wireless technologies, enabling devices to be smaller, require less signal strength and use less power.
What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off. A new class of synthetic materials could herald the next revolution of wireless technologies, enabling devices to be smaller, require less signal strength and use less power.
The key to these advances lies in what experts call phononics, which is similar to photonics. Both take advantage of similar physical laws and offer new ways to advance technology. While photonics takes advantage of photons—or light—phononics does the same with phonons, which are the physical particles that transmit mechanical vibrations through a material, akin to sound, but at frequencies much too high to hear.
In a paper published in Nature Materials, researchers at the University of Arizona Wyant College of Optical Sciences and Sandia National Laboratories report clearing a major milestone toward real-world applications based on phononics.
By combining highly specialized semiconductor materials and piezoelectric materials not typically used together, the researchers were able to generate giant nonlinear interactions between phonons. Together with previous innovations demonstrating amplifiers for phonons using the same materials, this opens up the possibility of making wireless devices such as smartphones or other data transmitters smaller, more efficient and more powerful.
« Most people would probably be surprised to hear that there are something like 30 filters inside their cell phone whose sole job it is to transform radio waves into sound waves and back, » said the study’s senior author, Matt Eichenfield, who holds a joint appointment at the UArizona College of Optical Sciences and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Part of what are known as front-end processors, these piezoelectric filters, made on special microchips, are necessary to convert sound and electronic waves multiple times each time a smartphone receives or sends data, he said.
Because these can’t be made out of the same materials, such as silicon, as the other critically important chips in the front-end processor, the physical size of your device is much bigger than it needs to be, and along the way, there are losses from going back and forth between radio waves and sound waves that add up and degrade the performance, Eichenfield said.
