Pulses of light need to be lined up in a fiberoptic cable. Now, a team has come up with a method for fitting pulses together within the fibers. Technology Briefing
Transcript
Optical fibers carry data in the form of pulses of light over
distances of thousands of miles at amazing speeds. Since the technology
appeared in the 1970s, the data capacity of fiber optics has increased
by a factor of 10 every four years, but for the last few years we've
reached a bottleneck because they have limited capacity.
The pulses of light need to be lined up one after the other in the
fiber with a minimum distance between them so the signals don't
interfere with each other. This leaves unused empty space for data in
the fiber.
But now, a Swiss team has come up with a method for fitting pulses
together within the fibers, thereby reducing the space between pulses.
The team's work, which was recently published in Nature Communications,
makes it possible to use all the capacity in an optical fiber. This
opens the door to a 10-fold increase in throughput in telecommunications
systems.
Unlike most methods of supplying the additional throughput needed to
meet growing consumer demand, this approach does not require changes to
the fibers themselves, such as pulling out and replacing the existing
infrastructure.
The team looked at the fundamental issue of how best to generate the
pulses that carry the digital data. This approach means only the
transmitters would need to be changed.
The breakthrough is based on a method that can produce what are known
as "Nyquist sinc pulses" almost perfectly. These pulses have a shape
that's more pointed, making it possible to fit them together like the
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle lock together.
