Editorial

Abstract

Chris Toumazou 2018 was another year of exciting development for Electronics Letters. The subjects of its published papers continued to diversify, reflecting the expansion of its editorial board – the board now numbers in excess of 250, with 103 new members joining in 2018. 22 countries are represented, and we are certainly hoping to expand further, given that over sixty countries are numbered amongst the 4000 submissions to the journal. As mentioned, these submissions span the entire scope of electrical and electronic engineering, from numerous applications of liquid metal to signal processing for biomedical applications; or cover-song identification, and single-photon diodes to quantum computing. The intriguing world of memristors was the subject of this year's IET Premium Award winner: ‘Extreme Multistability In A Memristive Circuit’, by Bo-Cheng Bao, Quan Xu, Han Bao, and Mo Chen, [Electronics Letters, 2016, 52, (12), pp. 1008–1010]. The judges were impressed by, and excited to see, “a paper on a ‘proper’ memristor, not an RRAM device called a memristor. The circuit produces a very interesting dynamic response that includes chaos, here called extreme multistability – it is an intriguing concept which provides nonlinearity and very complex circuit behaviour.” From memristors, we move onto photonic crystal fibres, with ‘High Numerical Aperture, Highly Birefringent Novel Photonic Crystal Fibre For Medical Imaging Applications', by J. Sultana, Md.S. Islam, M.R. Islam, and D. Abbott, [Electronics Letters, 2018, 54, (2), pp. 61–62]. The fibre they present can be manufactured using 3D printing and possesses low effective material loss and negligible confinement loss in the terahertz frequency band. Their technique overcomes the problem that terahertz wave transmission is largely limited to free-space applications due to the lack of suitable waveguides. Electronics Letters has been at the forefront of silicon photonics research since its development in the 1980s, and this continued in 2018 with ‘490 Fs Pulse Generation From Passively Mode-Locked Single Section Quantum Dot Laser Directly Grown On On-Axis GaP/Si’ by S. Liu, D. Jung, J. C. Norman, M. J. Kennedy, A. C. Gossard, and J. E. Bowers, [Electronics Letters, 2018, 54, (7), pp. 432–433]. This fascinating work presents the first experimental demonstration of a 31 GHz single section Quantum-dot-mode-locked semiconductor lasers directly grown on on-axis (001) GaP/Si substrate using molecular beam epitaxy. The laser shows a threshold current of 34 mA with a cavity length of 1330 μm at 20°C. 490 fs pulse generation with a narrow 3 dB RF linewidth of 100 kHz is obtained when the laser is forward biased around 470 mA. With continued research into the behaviour and decoherence of qubits, quantum computing and communication is slowly moving into the realm of engineering: ‘Qubit State Detection And Enhancement By Quantum Thermal Noise’, by N. Gillard, E. Belin, and F. Chapeau-Blondeau, [Electronics Letters, 2018, 54, (1), pp. 38–39]. Reading the state of a qubit is, for obvious reasons, one of the main concerns in the field, and the authors address the problem of detecting or discriminating between two noisy quantum states. Crucially, regimes are found where higher noise temperatures are more favourable to detection, with relation to stochastic resonance effects where noise becomes beneficial to information processing. These highlights, as well as the hundreds of papers published each year by Electronics Letters, represent the great journey ahead for the journal and for the subject as a whole. Finally, we would like to thank the editorial and production teams at the IET, the editorial board, and of course the many thousands of peer-reviewers who make the journal possible. That the reviewers take the time out of their busy schedules and roles to support the community is hugely appreciated, and is one of the reasons that the community, not just Electronics Letters, is flourishing.