As of August 1st, the Electrum building in Kista hosts the entire KTH School of ICT. Renovations have been intensive for the last 18 months and now the new and old tenants could all celebrate the second inauguration, as the house was originally inaugurated in 1987. This change is very positive for EIT ICT Labs Stockholm with even closer co-location with the core partners and a new office in the building for STING and a startup space at SICS Level 6.
Nobel Prize in Physics connected to Electrum research group
It may be of interest to the EIT ICT Labs community that the Electrum environment not only hosts a lot of ICT competence but also large microelectronics and photonics facilities, thus providing a link to also to the high performance hardware needed to support ICT developments. October, being the time of year for announcements of the 2014 Nobel prizes, KTH and Kista Science City representatives were happy to include in their speeches that the Electrum hosts many world class researchers, this year a group that work closely with the winner in Physics, Shuji Nakamura.
- We have an active collaboration since five years back and have published nine research papers together. What we did 20 years ago was just start and much more work still remains, says Saulius Marcinkevicius, professor in Optics.
- The technology we developed are more or less the same as those used by the Nobel Prize winners, says professor Gunnar Landgren, EIT ICT Labs Stockholm Node Director and one of the driving forces behind the research in the 1990’s. However, they are aiming at producing blue light whereas we worked with other materials and looked at producing infrared light.
Research in fibreoptical light important for ICT technology of today and tomorrow
The infrared light was a cornerstone in the development of today’s fibre optic communication which became a successful commercialization of a research area at KTH.
- Today this technology is in every home with a fibreoptical connection to the Internet, says Gunnar Landgren.
In the Electrum lab researchers are working on how we could use the fibreoptical light in our computers, which could be a game-changer for computers in a similar way as optical fibers were for the Internet.
