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Optical Fiber With a Silicon Core
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Optical Society of America, U.S. researchers have been able to create a practical optical fiber with a silicon core. As they were able to use the same commercial methods that are used to develop all-glass fibers, this might pave the way for future silicon fibers as viable alternatives to glass fibers. The scientists note that this should help increase efficiency and decrease power consumption in computers and other systems that integrate photonic and electronic devices. Here is a good summary by the lead researcher: 'In the past, we've needed one structure to process light and another to carry it. With a silicon fiber, for the first time, we have the ability to greatly enhance the functionality in one fiber.'"
There's a boob joke in here, somewhere.
Actually, the underlined text in the summary is called a link. Click it and you will see what is called TFA. It actually explains some of the potential advantages of the silicon core.
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glass is silicon dioxide. Silicon is pure Si.
More fiber!
So is silicon, at for infrared wavelengths.
From TA. "Usually an optical fiber is made by starting with a glass core, wrapping it with a cladding made from a slightly different glass, and then heating the structure until it can be pulled out into long wires. This works well enough, but for some wavelengths of light, a core made of pure crystalline silicon, like the one developed by the Clemson team, would better carry signals. Additionally, crystalline silicon exhibits certain nonlinear properties (in which the output is not proportional to the input) that are many orders of magnitude larger than for conventional silica glass. This would, for example, allow for the amplification of a light signal or for the shifting of light from one wavelength to another. The development of a silicon fiber opens the way for signal processing functions that are currently done electronically or in separate optical circuits to be performed directly inside the fiber, which allows for more compact, efficient systems."
Glass is made from silica, which is silicon dioxide. This, on the other hand, is pure silicon crystal. So, it's different in many ways, just as aluminium is different from corundum. Although admittedly silicon crystals are closer to glass than a beer can is to a ruby.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
The silicon crystals they grow for wafers are huge these days. Presuming that they draw it out the same way that they do traditional fiber optic cable, they'll get plenty of length.
A BIG optical fiber is 100 microns across (0.1 mm). A big wafer is 300mm. So they stretch down over 3000 times in size, which should give you 9 MILLION times the original length, unless my math fails me. I don't know how long the crystal is that they grow these days for wafers, but one only half a meter long should go a long way at that diameter...
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I don't see how unfair it is that Roland Piquepaille should receive compensation for what effectively is online research. It's at least as fair as Slashdot, a for-profit company, getting loads of free online research from article submitters.
How do you lose out by his $80 an article?
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
the wavers are actually sliced out of big single crystalline cylinders; making the cylinders bigger was what slowed the progress of waver growth. I don't think you can "draw" the crystal in a conventional sense, but since the material is extremely clean, it should recrystalize back into a single crystal out of the melt.
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Going after the robo-ladies, AC?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I was wondering the same thing. Silicon is not a glass, and cannot be stretched like a glass can.
Glasses have very fuzzy 'melting points'. In other words, they just get gooey rather than becoming a liquid. Silicon on the other hand, has a well defined melting point, and is not gooey.
Now, silicon crystals ARE grown inside of SiO2 lined graphite crucibles. So, I imagine that they might be able to melt the silicon inside of a Si02 layer, and stretch both. Then, when it cools, the silicon will form microcrystals. So, it wouldn't be crystalline, but it would still be transparent to photons with energy below 1.1 eV (wavelength greater than 1.1 um).