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Fibre optics and optical communications is the use of thin strands of glass for sending information encoded into light over long distances. Total internal reflection prevents light inserted into one end of the fibre from escaping through the sides. Transferring information optically in this way enables much higher transmission rates than using an electrical signal.
The authors present a scalable on-chip parallel intensity modulation and direct detection (IM-DD) data transmission system. This system offers an aggregate line rate of 1.68 Tbit/s over a 20-km-long SMF. For the chromatic dispersion compensation of 40-km-SMFs, the energy consumption is ~0.3 pJ/bit, much less than the commercial 400G-ZR coherent transceivers counterparts.
Leveraging photonic integration and photonic computing acceleration, Lu et al. proposed and demonstrated a scalable integrated silicon photonic processor that enables high-capacity optical fiber communications using various fiber spatial modes.
Optical recurrent neural networks present a unique challenge for photonic machine learning. Here, the authors experimentally show the first optoacoustic recurrent operator based on stimulated Brillouin scattering which may unlock a new class of optical neural networks with recurrent functionality.
Hybrid Rayleigh-Brillouin-Raman distributed sensing system: Coded pulse pairs are employed for simultaneously measuring vibration, strain and temperature distributions, through an optimized detection scheme of Rayleigh, Brillouin, and Raman scatterings.
Trojan beams, which are optical counterparts of Trojan asteroids that maintain stable orbits alongside planets, have been successfully showcased in experiments, opening up possibilities for transporting light in unconventional settings.
The use of on-chip nonlinear waveguides that can convert 1.5-μm wavelength signals into the 2-μm region brings new opportunities for expanding the bandwidth of optical communications.