"Time Telescope" Could Boost Fibre-Optic Communications

An anonymous reader writes "A time lens can focus a chunk of time to a point, rather like a normal lens focuses light rays. Put two time lenses together and you can create what a Cornell University team calls a 'time domain telescope' which can magnify time. They sent a 2.5 nanosecond long light pulse, encoding 24 bits of information, into their time telescope. What came out on the other side was the same 24 bit pulse, but compressed into 92 picoseconds. Squashing more information into a light pulse could help to send more information via optical fibres."

Comments

Deceptive Name

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm used to these physics guys doing all kinds of crazy things with invisibility cloaks and such so I took the title to be a literal time lense.

After RTFA, the "time lense" is a frequency up-shifter. Still impressive, but not supernatural as I had hoped.

First descibed in 1834 by John Scott Russell

[viking80]

This is a complete oversell on a normal everyday phenomenon. This is a simple compression of a lightpulse, and has been done for a long time. Dispersion usually smears out a pulse, but can easily, compress the pulse. There is no "bending of time" here. Look up "Chirped pulse amplification" and also "Prism compressor", and maybe "soliton". First descibed in 1834 by John Scott Russell