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Nano-Scale Optical Co-Axial Cables Announced
toybuilder writes "Reuters reports that scientists have published their work on nano-scale optical coax in the most recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. The coax cable is only about 300nm wide, and is able to transmit optical signals using a carbon center conductor, transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light."
The coax cable is only about 300nm wide,...
How do you plug it in?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The coax cable is only about 300nm wide, and is able to transmit optical signals using a carbon center conductor, transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light.
methinks the speed of light is whatever speed the light travels at.
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muh diKKK
Honest question here, I thought the speed of light was absolute. So why then does this cable allow allow the light to travel at 90% of the speed of light? What is causing this slow down?
Although light might at 90% of the speed of light vacuum when passing through some other substance...
Coax for light?
Why?
Did they also discover some new physics that replaces Maxwell's equations with some bazaaro world version where light causes inductance?
--MarkusQ
With really tiny tweezers.
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Very carefully.
Well, clearly there's a flaw in their design. Any entity that keeps going 90% of the speed of itself is quickly going to come to a complete stop.
The fibers are k3w1, but what I really want to know is how they got the silly things to be so much less of a "drag" than teflon. If they can extend that, it has a lot more immediate applications as a low- material than as a fast lightpipe.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
As soon as I read that, it occurred to me that half of the comments were going to focus on that one sentence. And what do you know? I was right.
You live and learn. At least, you live.
Sorry to be picky but the following statement sounds like the author hasn't graduated high school: "transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light". Try "transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light IN A VACUUM" or "transmitting DATA at about 90% the speed of light IN A VACUUM" instead. Light always travels at the speed of light. In fact most things I know of travel at their own speed.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It was my understanding that electric fields propagate through copper at about 1/3 C.
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The thinner the fiber, the less the digital light pulses are spread (due to reflections on the fiber shell) per unit distance, the more information can be sent through per unit time.
Thinner means more bandwidth.
I think the thing we need to think about is when this may be useful to us. Right now it has to cost around elevenity billion dollars to make just enough to test... I think I will stick with the current speed of light through fiber.
Wake me up when they announce nano-scale HDMI.
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Was I the only one who did a double-take at that?
Yes, yes, I know that light travels at different speeds through different materials.
In other words, this nano-coax-cable has the proper physical characteristcs such that optical frequencies of EM radiation (ie, visible light) can be transmitted without significant dissipation or dispersion .
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10 people will post "in soviet russia you suck vacuum" jokes, of which the first 6 will be modded redundant and the last 4 modded up to anything between +2 and +5 funny,
I think you meant: "In Soviet Russia, vacuum sucks you".
Also might add the following:
1 person finally succeeds in combining a "in soviet russia" post with grammar nazi tactics.
I think you meant "One person invents the grammar commie."
Kramer: Why, I've plugged in cables so small I couldn't even see them! ... Well... I guess I just assumed...!
Elaine: How did you know you plugged them in?
Kramer:
You might want to cancel the pointy wizard hat you just ordered from theprophetshop.com, the summary is only two sentences long so half of the comments focusing on the second sentence isn't particularly odd. ;)
Will someone tell me *why* they did this? Yes, it's very cool. But the whole and only point of coax, as they talk about in TFA, is that it minimizes electrical influence.
If you're using light, there *isn't* any electrical interference, either as a transmitter or a receiver. That's one of the major benefits of using light.
So it's kind of pointless to make a coax, unless you really want a two-channel transmitter where one's a funny ring-shape. In which case, why not make optical ribbon cable?
Which brings up a wholly separate question: one reason industry has moved from parallel to very-high-speed serial is that you don't have to worry about timing and synchronicity, which are primarily due to impurities in copper. Is this an issue with optical? Coz the engineering is generally easier to run ten existing lines in parallel than to make one line ten times faster, if you don't have to worry about synchronizing them.
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Yeah, right. And the glass spere does know nuthink about that guy. <big silent but smelly one>
I mean, each pound of dark matter weighs over ten thousand pounds, so light moving at 90% of the speed of light seems pretty reasonable to me.
What material costs $1.93 for five tons?
Good glass I've used in fiber optics only allow about 0.6C, a much higher index of refraction. If it works like fiber optics the cladding would have a index of refraction of near 1.09. I guess they would be nano-dot calbes. Triaxial micro-dot cables were bad enough. john
Hey motherfuckers at Monster Cable: bigger isn't always better. Those assholes have driven up the price of HDMI and DVI cables to ridiculous levels thanks to arrangements with major electronics retailers to carry or feature their cables exclusively.
Anyway, suck it.
The Reuter's piece misses one significant fact about the work which is reported in the journal article (linked by kebes above).
The distance which light can be expected to travel though a structure like that which is described is only the order of 0.00005 meters, i.e. 2 one-thousanths of an inch, before it is absorbed due to the loss arising from the imperfectly conducting elements. That distance number is from the journal article itself. The devices which were made seem to have a length of only 0.000006 meters. That's about 6 times longer than the best related devices to date (again according to the article.)
When we're working on quantum physics and teleportation, why are we focusing on something as slow as the speed of light? If we've already teleported information via cables in the sewers beneath the Danube, why care about the speed of light, let alone anything less than it?
Actually, the speed of light in a vacuum is not constant at all, according to several current theories. Professor R.T. Cahill's process physics theory(i mention this one, cause i've had some lectures on it, but there are others) states that the speed of light is actually inconstant, and depends on the flow of space around it. I don't claim to understand it, being a humble chemist, but it's interesting stuff http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0203015 for a cahill paper
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Every time I try to solder a connector on a piece of 300nm-thick coax I wind up trying to strip off the shielding, but cutting off the inner conductor as well. Either that, or I forget to put the connector shell onto the cable first....
TFA starts off talking about coax and the wavelength of RF, then explains that they've made nanoscale coax (both the core and sheath are conductive), but then suddenly switches to talking about light! This makes no sense to me.
:-)
Now I know perfectly well that light is electromagnetic radiation just like RF but at a much higher frequency, but the difference between them is that an incident light wave doesn't induce a skin effect in conductors (or possibly it does but it gets cancelled out), whereas incident RF creates a very high skin effect --- that's what makes coax work. And their aluminium sheath is ordinary metal, so special tricks.
So where's the missing link in the topic/discussion? How is light at all relevant to the operation of this coax? Just because the carbon nanotube is roughly the right size to be resonant at light frequencies doesn't suddenly make the light behave differently with respect to the aluminium sheath.
Please explain.
Then you have to deal with radio licensing and/or line of sight issues.