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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!"
Finally, a bug that's beneficial to computers!
Ron Paul 2012
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?
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
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!
I am artificially intelligent.
The article may say that the diameter is 2 nm. But the diagram has the diameter labeled as 1 um. Which should we believe?
>NOTE FOR ALL USA CITIZENS: Replace all instances of the word "nanometre" with "1/25188917" inches.
OR 0,00000000004 olympic sized swimming pools!