UC Berkeley researchers have come up with a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces, a breakthrough that could be used to build improved telecom and computing systems.
Mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang and his team of compressed light into spaces as small as 10 nanometers, 20 times smaller than previously done. That’s a space 100 time skinnier than typical optical fibers. Zhang calls the scaling down of optical devices “the holy grail for the future of communications.”
Said Rupert Oulton, research associate in Zhang’s group and lead author of the study, published in the August issue of Nature Photonics: “This technique could give us remarkable control over light, and that would spell out amazing things for the future in terms of what we could do with that light.”
One advance would be eventually be putting electronics and optics on a similar scale so they can work together inside computers, or to the point where optics actually replace electronics in futuristic optical computers.
“We are pulling optics down to the length scales of electrons,” Oulton said in a statement. “And that means we can potentially do some things we have never done before.”
The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense helped fund this study.
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