Author: Heiner Linke, Professor of Nanophysics, Lund University

Modern computers are a triumph of technology. A single computer chip contains billions of nanometre-scaled transistors that operate extremely reliably and at a rate of millions of operations per second. However, this high speed and reliability comes at the cost of significant energy consumption: data centres and household IT appliances like computers and smartphones account for around 3% of global electricity demand, and the use of AI is likely to drive even more consumption. But what if we could redesign the way computers work so that they could perform computation tasks as quickly as today while using far less energy?…