Nanoscale Optical Fiber From Spider Silk

Makarand writes "Engineers may soon be able to make the finest optical fibers with some help from spiders. To make optical fibers narrower for nanoscale applications, researchers coated spider silk fibers with glassy material which was later removed by baking. The spider Stegodyphus pacificus, a native of the Middle East and South Asia, spins the thinnest known silk which promises to yield optical fibers with a diameter of around two nanometres!"

Comments

Hollow tubes

[nebbian]

Note that the operative word here is "Hollow". This ain't your grandfathers optical fibre!

Most optical fibres for communications are solid, that is they work by total internal reflection, where the light bounces off the outer wall of the cylinder (in modern fibres this isn't quite the case, they put different refractive indexes of glass around the outside to 'bend' the light but that's splitting hairs).
The hollow tubes in the article are weird beasts, allowing rather strange things to happen with less than full wavelengths of light -- they're not usually used for communications.

The samples that they made here are only about a centimetre long as well, and I don't think you could make really long tubes because you have to get the baked spider silk out of the tube when you're done! Imagine trying that with a 1 km-long length!