They have succeeded in their mission to increase the power and distance through which optical signals can be transmitted through optical cables.
Advertisement
Currently, there is a limit on the intensity of light you can send through a fiber optic link, which arises from the fact that when you increase the intensity of light through a fiber cable, noise, distortion and signal attenuation increases.
This is because some engineers on Thursday reported in Science magazine that they have successfully broken the capacity limit for fiber optic transmission and have opened the door to future networks that can carry more data further at cheaper costs.
Authors told, “We have presented a method for leveraging the crosstalk to remove the power barrier for optical fibre”. During their lab experiments, information that travelled from a record-breaking 12,000 kilometers through the cables were still decipherable by the tea. The new research suggests a path that effectively eliminates the regeneration over long distances. These pricey regenerators are similar to supercomputers that must be applied to each channel in the transmission.
Eggleton says the frequency comb used in the study is an emerging technology that is being developed by a number of groups globally. “Our approach conditions the information before it is sent, so the receiver is free of crosstalk caused by the Kerr effect“.
The seven-person team behind the study included five researchers from the UCSD Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and two researchers from the Qualcomm Institute, a division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology that’s named after the San Diego-based chipmaker (thanks to hefty donations) but operated jointly by UCSD and the University of California, Irvine. This approach compensates in advance for the crosstalk that occurs between the multiple communication channels within the same optical fiber. “These lasers are by no means flawless: their exact frequency has a certain tolerance, and furthermore they wander in frequency over time”. The system has only been tested on between 3 and 5 frequency channels so far.
The information is initially pre-distorted in a predictable and reversible way when it is sent through the optical fiber. Last year, the team theorised a possible solution that would enable them to raise the power beyond anything ever achieved before without requiring any amplifiers or repeaters. However, there are some who doubt whether the UC-San Diego research would translate well in actual application.
Advertisement
Sumitomo Electric Industries also supported the research.
