Fiber Optic

Economies of scale mean that densely populated cities have generally been the ones to benefit from the roll out of superfast broadband networks, while those in rural areas have missed out. Following Google's recent announcement that it will build and test 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks in selected cities with between 50,000 to 500,000 residents in the U.S. starting with Kansas City, Kansas, Fujitsu has unveiled plans to create a similar superfast FTTH broadband network for five million homes and businesses in rural Britain to bridge the digital divide between city and country.  Read More

Fiber optic cables can transmit over a terabyte of information per second – but that doesn’t mean there still isn’t room for improvement. One of those improvements, which was officially announced today, involves replacing the silica glass core of fiber optic strands with semiconductive zinc selenide. This new class of fiber optics, invented and created at Penn State University, is said to “allow for a more effective and liberal manipulation of light.” The technology could have applications in the fields of medicine, defense, and environmental monitoring.  Read More

Physicists from the University of Oregon have successfully changed the color of individual photons within a fiber optic cable. They were able to do so by focusing a dual-color burst of light from two lasers onto an optical cable carrying a single photon of a distinct color. Through a process known as Bragg scattering, a small amount of energy was exchanged between the laser light and the photon, causing the photon to change color. The achievement could pave the way for transferring and receiving high volumes of secured electronic data.  Read More

LEDs... is there anything they can’t do? Well yes, actually, there is. They can’t be something other than a point light source. That’s not ideal when it comes to flat – and increasingly thin – displays such as television and cell phone screens. How does one go about converting that three-dimensional point light source into a two-dimensional display, without losing much of its intensity? The answer could be found in a new machine that efficiently and inexpensively produces fiber optic film sheets.  Read More

One the many hidden gems we stumbled over at Computex 2010, the Panvista Borescope Package consists of a tiny fiber optic video camera, joined via a long flexible tube to a 3.5 inch hand-held color LCD monitor. The camera head is equipped with four Infrared LEDs, allowing it to see in the dark. Besides other useful applications, the camera can be used to peek inside a car’s engine via the spark plug hole.  Read More

Imagine that instead of carrying a camera in your jacket pocket, your entire jacket was the camera. That is the promise of a new type of light-detecting fibers developed by researchers at MIT. The team from the Institute's Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) has developed light-detecting fibers that, when woven into a web, act as a flexible “camera”. Fabric made from these fibers could be joined to a computer to create a large, foldable telescope or made into a soldier’s uniform to provide greater situational awareness.  Read More