| An international team led by CNRS researchers, including members of the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay), has revealed a remarkable phenomenon: the creation and disappearance of an electron gas simply by illuminating a material made of stacked oxide layers. This discovery, at the crossroads of optics and electronics, paves the way for a new generation of electronic components controlled by light rather than electricity. Published in Nature Materials, this work could revolutionize the design of electronic devices — from spintronics to quantum computing — by making circuits faster, more energy-efficient, and more compact. |
In the future, could our mobile phones and internet data operate using light rather than just electricity? Now, for the first time, an international research team led by CNRS researchers1 has discovered how to generate an electron gas, found for example in LED screens, by illuminating a material made up of layers of oxides2 . When the light is switched off, the gas disappears. This phenomenon, which lies at the interface of optics and electronics, paves the way for numerous applications in electronics, spintronics and quantum computing. It is described in an article to be published on 10 October in the journal Nature Materials.
Electronic components that can be controlled by light rather than electricity have the advantage of being much faster, more energy-efficient and simpler to operate: for example, the use of light-controlled transistors could eliminate up to a third of the electrical contacts on a chip, saving around a billion electrical contacts on a computer processor alone.
Other applications combining photonics and electronics could result from this discovery, such as the design of ultra-sensitive optical detectors. In this case, light effectively acts as a “booster”: for the same electrical voltage, the current produced is up to 100,000 times stronger than in the dark!
This breakthrough was achieved by combining cutting-edge experiments with theoretical calculations. The arrangement of the atoms at the interface between the two oxide layers was meticulously calibrated, observations at the atomic scale were used to identify the behaviour of the atoms, and modelling helped to describe the motion of their electrons when exposed to light stimuli.
Bibliography
Giant photoconductance at infinite-layer nickelate/SrTiO3 interfaces via an optically induced high-mobility electron gas. D. Sanchez-Manzano, G. Krieger, A. Raji, B. Geisler, V. Humbert, H. Jaffrès, J. Santamaría, R. Pentcheva, A. Gloter, D. Preziosi and Javier E. Villegas. Nature Materials, 10 October 2025.