To Paul Braun, the future of optical computing is crystal clear. Braun and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report that they've found a cheaper and simpler way to construct tiny optical "waveguides" inside photonic crystals. These waveguides have the potential to behave like the microscopic wires on a conventional microchip, except that they would transport photons rather than electrons around tangles of sub-micrometer-scale circuitry. And that could help make photonic crystals the basis for a new generation of far faster telecommunications and computing devices.

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