Are you sick of graphene-related breakthroughs yet? No? Excellent! That’s good news because I’m about to write the coolest, sexiest, most scientific sentence you’ll ever see on ExtremeTech. A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has shown that single-atom silicon defects in sheets of graphene act like atomic antennae, turning graphene into a plasmonic device capable of converting optical signals into electronic signals and vice versa.

Was that as good for you as it was for me? Anyway, getting back to business, the basic gist of this discovery is that the scientists may have found an incredibly novel way of transmitting data on an atomic scale. As it stands, the smallest communication channels in state-of-the-art CMOS are 0.05 microns, or 50nm. Here we are talking about two sheets of graphene connected by a two-atom silicon wire that’s around 0.1nm in diameter.

This isn’t a “wire” in the usual sense, though: it’s a plasmonic device. A plasmon, if you were unfortunate enough to not study post-graduate-level particle physics, is a quantum piece of plasma. A plasmon, when it is struck by light, oscillates very rapidly and produces an electric current. This current then jumps across to the receiving plasmon which then turns the excited electrons back into light.

As far as applications for this discovery go, we’re really treading along the bleeding edge. Most plasmonic applications are purely theoretical at the moment. Plasmons could be used as an interconnect on computer chips, as they support frequencies up to hundreds of terahertz, while copper wires max out in the gigahertz range. You’ll be happy to hear that some scientists have created a plasmonic transistor called a plasmonster, too.

Also along the same lines, plasmons have been used — in a lab setting — to perform very high resolution lithography and microscopy.

Read more at ScienceDaily