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Communications Breakthrough: Amplifying Light with Air

Researchers at EPFL  have developed a technology to amplify light inside the latest hollow-core optical fibers, in a breakthrough that is promising for the future of communications. Conventional optical fibers usually have a solid glass core, so there is no air inside. Light can travel along the fibers but loses half of its intensity after 15 kilometers. The new approach is based on new hollow-core optical fibers that are filled with either air or gas. “The air means there’s less attenuation, so the light can travel over a longer distance. That’s a real advantage,” says EPFL researcher Luc Thévenaz. The researchers added pressure to the air in the fiber to give us some controlled resistance, making the light considerably more powerful.

Topics:
Materials Photonics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 in this lab we are performing research on optical fiber so you can see plenty of optical fiber in my back these are the tiny glass wire that transmits a high density of information and to transmit this high density of information we need a very high power we would like to transmit

    00:00:22 this information as far as possible so now we can transmit it over hundreds of kilometers but we would like to go further so we develop a new type of optical fiber where the light is no longer in the glass but is in a hollow tube containing air in the center so we have much less interaction

    00:00:43 so we can go further and with less distortion but the backside of the coin is that we are losing the possibility to transform this light using advanced functions our research was a way to restore this possibility we are using an effect called optical tweezers where we can trap

    00:01:05 very light particles in the beam of light and it works with gas molecule so we can trap gas molecule and concentrate and the concentration of this gas molecule is patterned very regularly in the optical fiber and it can deviate the light very efficiently

    00:01:24 using an effect that we all know very well uh this when we observe a flow of hot air we see that the light is blurred and this has exactly the same effect so we can couple the light from intense light beam into a weak beam that we want to amplify the advantage of this is that we are restoring the possibility to make this

    00:01:43 function and we can store the light we can amplify it we can slow it down we can accelerate the light we can make very nice and moreover the big advantage is that it works in any gas and with any light from ultraviolet to infrared so we can use simply air to amplify the light or to store

    00:02:07 information [Music]