Scientists working at the University of Cambridge have used a form of liquid light to create a semiconductor switch that is so small that it not only blurs the distinction between light and electricity, but could also enable the development of much faster and smaller electronic components well into the future.

With the limits of Moore's Law looming closer day by day, the demand for faster, smaller electronics ever increasing, and microelectronics reaching the point where quantum effects are seriously challenging the continued use of electrons as a transporter of data, researchers the world over are exploring ways to solve these problems.

With contemporary methods used to convert between electrical signals and optical ones considered largely inefficient, University of Cambridge researchers believe that it would be better simply to cut out the middleman and mix the two together. In a quest to achieve this, the researchers created a switch using a new state of matter known as a Polariton Bose-Einstein condensate to combine electric and optical signals, while consuming infinitesimally small quantities of energy in the process.