All-Optical Switch Device Paves Way for Faster Fiber-Optic Communication
20th October 2024
Modern high-speed internet uses light to quickly and reliably transmit large amounts of data through fiber-optic cables, but currently, light signals hit a bottleneck when data processing is necessary. For that, they must convert into electrical signals for processing before further transmission.
A device called an all-optical switch could instead use light to control other light signals without the need for electrical conversion, saving both time and energy in fiber-optic communication.
A University of Michigan-led research team demonstrated an ultrafast all-optical switch by pulsing circularly polarized light, which twists like a helix, through an optical cavity lined with an ultrathin semiconductor. The study was recently published in Nature Communications.