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Monday, September 26, 2011

#OPTICS: "World's First Nanoscale Optical Fibers'

Photonic chips that compute with light instead of electricity--the holy grail of optics--will enable a faster, more sustainable Internet, by virtue of lowering its power consumption with the world's smallest optical fibers.



Researchers have created nanowires generated by direct laser writing, here stacked to form a three-dimensional woodpile photonic crystal with a pronounced stop gap.

At its current rate of growth, the Internet is on track to consume half the world's energy in the next decade, according to professor Min Gu, the Director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology. To head off the debacle, Gu's research group has created the world's smallest optical fibers, which he claims will enable not only a faster, but a more sustainable Internet, by virtue of reduced energy consumption.
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