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

The silk is removed, not the glassy coating

[Simon Field]

The post made it sound like the glassy coating was being removed.

The light then travels in the air filled core, not in the glass.

The use in scanning near-field microscopes is interesting, but don't we already have versions of those that use nono-sized particles that emit light (fluoresce), instead of the types that use fiber optics as the light source?

Have these fibres been tested?

[spotted_dolphin]

The theory behind producing these fibres seem valid, but is there any evidence that these fibres are able to propogate light rays? My concern is that natural organic fibres do not have a perfectly smooth surface which the silicate solution will adhere to, contrary to synthetically produced fibres. Do imperfections on the inner surface of the tubule affect how light will travel? Or does this not matter?

use in CPUs?

[Tumbleweed]

So would this make optical interconnects in CPUs practical?