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"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."
As others have noted, it's likely there's a fundamental Shannon limit in there somewhere.
It's not impossible but very likely that this scheme will work, but you lose a proportionate amount of something else. Yes, NO FREE LUNCH. Likely candidates are that the Signal/noise ratio will suffer by the same factor as the alleged speed increase, or the phase margins will degrade by the same amount.
Again this kind of thing has been studied to death by Bell Labs. See their research journals-- probably 5000 pages there devoted to analyzing fiber optic communications.