Scientists: ‘Buzz’ to break optical bottlenecks

That buzzing you hear in your paranoid ears may one day be augmented by a new technique aimed at eliminating bottlenecks in fiber-optic networks.

According to Scientific American, scientists from Duke University and the Institute of Optics at University of Rochester have demonstrated in Science that data encoded on a laser beam can be transferred to sound waves momentarily before returning back into light waves, potentially eliminating packet buffering bottleneck issues in optical networks.

Two laser beams of differing frequencies pointed at each other along a glass fiber create acoustic vibrations, the researchers found. These vibrations, aka phonons, can retain encoded information for 12 billionths of a second, after which a third laser transfers the data back into light.

The acoustic hitch will allow optical networks to temporarily store data in the event that two packets hit a router simultaneously.

Crackpot or not, the technology will not be ready commercially for years, as scientists experiment to elongate storage times and reduce the laser power necessary to produce the phonons and transfer encoded data back into light waves.

Experiments are likely to focus on the material makeup of communication fibers that could best capitalize on the research findings.

One possible solution would be to use chalcogenide, the stuff currently being put to use in the development of phase-change memory technologies.

The second, according to the Scientific American article, would be to fill hollow optical fibers with a gas such as Xenon, thereby reducing laser-power requirements and increasing phonon lifespan.

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