Quick as a flash

The Internet could one day get a speed boost from light-emitting polymers. An
optical “modulator” chip developed at the University of Southern California can
translate electrical data pulses into pulses of light at rates in excess of 100
gigabytes per second—fast enough to transfer a two-hour DVD movie in a
fifth of a second. The key was creating polymers in which the electric fields of
the molecules’ light-emitting regions do not interfere with each other—a
problem that until now has slowed such chips down (Science, vol 288, p
119).