Scientists Discover "gyromorphs" Materials to Enhance Light-Based Computers

I like the name gyromorphs. Now, this name tells me absolutely nothing, but it's pretty cool - even more when it focuses on "light-based computers".

Glass fibers changed the world. It makes sense to push computers towards that too, not only quantum computers but all kinds of information-based computer systems. We have a lot of untapped potential everywhere here, including data storage. Right now I have a 2TB harddisc. I want a tiny harddisc but with, say, 100TB, and at an affordable cost.

Go nanotech, go! Make it happen already.

Isn't optical computing basically a scam? To achieve the same circuit density that we currently have with semiconductors, they would have to operate on photons with ~1nm wavelength, which is in the X-ray range.

My favorite part about these class of materials is that the computational cost to design them is so high.

We finally have computers powerful enough to design optical metamaterials with enough precision that they are a reasonably affordable thing to make (each real experiment in making these is on the order of $100,000, and the design space is so large >10^10 that we could never reconcile the two without in-silicon experiments).

Gyromorphs seem to be Fourier transforms of quasicrystals.. if that makes them less mysterious

[fig 2a] panels show near-perfect agreement between the real (resp. reciprocal) features of gyromorphs and the reciprocal (resp. real) features of quasicrystals.

https://arxiv.org/html/2410.09023v1

Another paper of the week on experimentally discovering quasicrystals (& now, also gyromorphs

https://arxiv.org/html/2506.18473v2