Light work: Computing at the speed of light has been a long time coming, but a new generation of optical processors promise to be faster ' and cooler ' than electronic incumbents

DATA HAS BEEN sent across wide-area networks as light pulses for decades, but optical (or photonic) computing has been slow to meet the challenges of moving data in the form of light at the processor level: photons have proved profoundly trickier to traffic than electrons. And while conventional data processing continued to get faster year-after-year, there seemed scant incentive for technologists to crack the optical conundrum.