Optical communications

Following the successful deployment of photonics in long-haul communications, the technology is now making its way down the food chain and changing the way data is brought into the home, and perhaps ultimately passed around it.

Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) technology, which provides a high-speed optical-data link directly into the house or apartment, is now becoming very popular in Japan and Korea. Adarsh Sandhu spoke to the FTTH Council Asia Pacific about the status of the technology in the region.

Unwanted reflections can severely limit the performance of optical components. David Gevaux spoke to Fred Schubert from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute about how his nanomaterials with a refractive index almost equal to that of air can help.

A new Internet is emerging. One in which dedicated optical circuits allow researchers to connect to computers all over the world and interactively work with massive datasets in real time. The technology is opening up new avenues in science, and this is just the beginning.

Despite two decades of work geared towards improving the nonlinear optical properties of organic molecules, practical organic light modulators have not yet reached the market in large numbers. New organic-inorganic hybrid approaches may revolutionize the field.

Slow light has captured the imagination of physicists for over a decade. Although single light pulses have been slowed down in a variety of settings, a group at Rochester University has now managed to delay an entire image for the first time.

Optical technology is becoming smaller and smaller, and it doesn't get much smaller than nanophotonic devices and metamaterials. NANOMETA-2007 gave researchers the opportunity to gather together in the cold to discuss these hot topics.

A Cambridge start-up company is opening a large manufacturing facility for organic electronic circuits. The news is expected to accelerate the deployment of electronic-paper displays.

Controlling light in optical systems quickly and easily is crucial for all-optical switching. An approach that does this by exploiting the condensation of gases in a porous structure could open up new avenues in the switching field.

The advent of bandwidth-hungry multimedia services such as video on demand and Internet-protocol-based TV is driving operators to deploy high-speed fibre-to-the-home connections.

As data rates continue to spiral upwards, electrical interconnects based on copper traces and wires are struggling to keep up and optical solutions are looking increasingly attractive.

What will optical communications be capable of in the next decade? Transmission of 10 Tbit s⁻¹ over a single fibre and a reconfigurable transparent network are two possibilities.