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Hollow Optical Fibres Can Now Process Signals
Ami_Chan writes: "According to Nature, researchers at Bell Labs have created a new type of optical fibre. This fibre is hollow, and can be tuned to different wavelengths of light using 'plugs of fluid' and temperature changes within the fibre. This allows the fibres to process signals as well as transmit them. The full article is here."
Now I just wish I wasn't all wacked out on a coke slurpee and sluggish from lunch so that I could think about the implications and actually say something intelligent.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
wouldnt this system be susceptable to distortion through vibration? if the line is bumped it would cause a shift in the fluid, if only a minute one, possiply distroying the signal. it would be interesting to se what measures bell labs has taken to account for this if amy at all.
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I'd be interested to know exactly how it works. The article talks in length about heat and fluid changing the light but either I'm missing something or it doesn't really say how.
Is it really changing the light or are they creating some kind of filter?
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...with a heat gun. So all I have to do is heat the fibre up and completely destroy data integrity? Sounds like a great idea.
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This sounds like it's based on the same technique used to make filters in the microwave band. By creating a transmission line with several appropriately spaced steps in the impedance, you can create a low-pass filter. With some more sophisticated branching of the line, you can make a high-pass or a band-pass filter. The technique relies on interference and reflection effects from the boundaries between the transmission line sections. I think they're doing the same sort of thing here; introducing fluid into the center of the line will change its refraction coefficient, which takes roughly the same role in the fiber that impedance does in a transmission line.
Would this type of wire be easier/harder to tap into than normal fiber optic wire?
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
OK, I understand the researchers were doing very cool things that might have a whole range of interesting uses, but...
I thought the whole lesson of the Internet was that the network should provide connectivity only, with a bare minimum of built-in processing...
because, if you put processing into the network you are making fundamental assumptions about how the network is going to be used. In other words, processing within the network = optimizing for predetermined uses = locking out future evolution and outside innovation.
Shades of the old Bell Labs that were committed to circuit-switching and opposed to packet-switching!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
will fiber optic ever be changed to an analog version with the wave of the light being the transport of data rather than the flashing?
It seems that the data would be moved much faster if the sensors were able to pick up on individual light colors and waves rather than just on/off of the light. This would be able to work similar to how a modem works with diffrent tones producing diffrent characters, etc...
ps.
If this is already how fiber works than my understanding is just way off and please disregard.
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I can't wait.
The future I see coming out well before optical microprocessors:
Field Programmable Fiber Arrays. They will be hybrid chips with semiconductor controls and fiber optic IO. The telecoms are gonna shit their pants when this stuff comes out. These are going to be ultra-high speed stateless DSP's, capable of outprocessing their electronic counterparts in magnitudes of superiority.
Just imagine the benefits:
Less latency
Higher bandwidth
On-The-Fly topology reconfiguration
Learning switch fabric
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