[Light. Photo Credit to Pixabay]

Researchers at the University of Arizona announced in December 2025 that they had reported a new set of findings showing how a single beam of ultrafast laser light can switch electricity on and off inside graphene.

Graphene, which is only one atom thick, has long been celebrated as a wonder material due to its strength, flexibility and excellent electrical conductivity.

In this study, researchers directed ultrafast femtosecond laser pulses onto graphene and observed that the electric current inside the material changed at attosecond timescales.

An attosecond is so brief that billions of them fit into one second, making the effect difficult to even imagine in everyday terms.

A notable aspect of the experiment is that it does not require any physical switch or mechanical movement.

Instead, the researchers simply aimed tiny bursts of light at a small graphene device, and the material responded immediately.

When the light was more intense, the electric current became stronger.

Conversely, when the light was weaker, the current decreased.

When the light was turned off, the current vanished right away.

This reaction is similar to flipping a switch with an invisible hand made of light.

Even more importantly, all of this happened at room temperature without the need for special laboratory conditions such as extreme cooling or vacuum systems.

This condition may make the method more practical than approaches that require special equipment.

Graphene has long been praised for many years because it is thin, light, strong, and an excellent conductor.

This new study suggests an additional potential application for graphene.

In most materials, altering electrical behavior requires chemical processing, adding impurities, or designing complex circuits.

This research shows that graphene can change its electrical properties instantly any physical interaction.

The only thing needed is to adjust the brightness of the light shining on it.

This innovation suggests a future where many electronic devices do not rely on traditional wires or physical switches.

Instead, beams of light could guide the movement of electrons directly, and far faster than any mechanical device could manage.

The potential applications of this discovery are wide-ranging.

If scientists continue to advance this method, future computers and artificial intelligence processors could become much faster than those available today.

Current computers operate in the gigahertz range, but the switching speed observed in graphene is close to the petahertz range.

In theory, this implies that more than a quadrillion operations could be performed each second.

Such performance could contribute to advances in areas such as data science, medicine, and robotics.

Given that graphene is extremely thin and flexible, this technology may also lead to new types of foldable or wearable displays.

Additionally, it could enable extremely sensitive sensors for environmental monitoring or medical diagnostics.

In the long term, the strong response of graphene to light could pave the way for more efficient solar cells or other energy devices.

Although the results are impressive, the discovery is still at an early stage.

Further research is needed to build larger circuits, confirm long term stability, and develop practical devices that can be produced on a large scale.

Nevertheless, the researchers emphasize the importance of these findings.

For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that electrons in graphene can be directly guided by light in real time.

This achievement could pave the way for a new direction in future electronic research.

Graphene has always had great promise, but this experiment suggests that graphene may play a more important role in future research.

It suggests a future where electronics could become thinner, faster, and more responsive, and where a simple flash of light may be enough to control the flow of electricity.