If your Internet access is a lot slower than you'd like, don't blame Bill Gates— blame atomic physics. Fiber-optic cables can carry torrents of information around the world in a fraction of a second. But getting the data into your home computer requires making a connection between fiber, which carries light, and silicon circuits, which carry electricity. The laws of physics do not encourage such connections.
William Gillin, a physicist at Queen Mary, University of London, may have hit on a way to get around the rules. In the past, researchers tried depositing light-emitting material on top of silicon chips. Electrical signals from the chips were supposed to excite the overlying layers and translate those signals into corresponding flashes of light. The atomic structure of the materials that give off light is incompatible with silicon, however, and the devices cracked and failed. So Gillin and his colleagues tried something very ...
