Very cool geeky light stuff
Very cool geeky light stuff
Light and data.
H/T Mani Saint-Victor
Originally shared by Jan Wyllie
A NEW PROPERTY OF LIGHT DISCOVERED -
A polarising vortex
I wonder whether there is much more to this disovery than meets the eye ... even the eyes of the MIT scientests who discovered it. The demand for desktop particle accelerators and yet more fibre optic data capacity is liable to be limited. Microlaser technology could enable many as yet unknown useful applications.
Citation:
Light can usually be confined only with mirrors, or with specialized materials such as photonic crystals. Both of these approaches block light beams; last year's finding demonstrated a new method in which the waves cancel out their own radiation fields. The new work shows that this light-trapping process, which involves twisting the polarization direction of the light, is based on a kind of vortex—the same phenomenon behind everything from tornadoes to water swirling down a drain.
In addition to revealing the mechanism responsible for trapping the light, the new analysis shows that this trapped state is much more stable than had been thought, making it easier to produce and harder to disturb.
The finding, Soljačić says, could also enable easy implementation of super-resolution imaging (using a method called stimulated emission depletion microscopy) and could allow the sending of far more channels of data through a single optical fiber.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-12-halting-photons-miniature-particle-transmission.html#jCp
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-halting-photons-miniature-particle-transmission.html#jCp
Light and data.
H/T Mani Saint-Victor
Originally shared by Jan Wyllie
A NEW PROPERTY OF LIGHT DISCOVERED -
A polarising vortex
I wonder whether there is much more to this disovery than meets the eye ... even the eyes of the MIT scientests who discovered it. The demand for desktop particle accelerators and yet more fibre optic data capacity is liable to be limited. Microlaser technology could enable many as yet unknown useful applications.
Citation:
Light can usually be confined only with mirrors, or with specialized materials such as photonic crystals. Both of these approaches block light beams; last year's finding demonstrated a new method in which the waves cancel out their own radiation fields. The new work shows that this light-trapping process, which involves twisting the polarization direction of the light, is based on a kind of vortex—the same phenomenon behind everything from tornadoes to water swirling down a drain.
In addition to revealing the mechanism responsible for trapping the light, the new analysis shows that this trapped state is much more stable than had been thought, making it easier to produce and harder to disturb.
The finding, Soljačić says, could also enable easy implementation of super-resolution imaging (using a method called stimulated emission depletion microscopy) and could allow the sending of far more channels of data through a single optical fiber.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-12-halting-photons-miniature-particle-transmission.html#jCp
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-halting-photons-miniature-particle-transmission.html#jCp
Mani Saint-Victor Crank it up to red line!
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