The new laser developed in Amnon Yariv's laboratory includes a layer of silicon, which does not absorb light--a quality important for laser purity.
A new laser developed by a research group at Caltech holds the potential to increase by orders of magnitude the rate of data transmission in the optical-fiber network-the backbone of the Internet. The study was published the week of February 10-14 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The work is the result of a five-year effort by researchers in the laboratory of Amnon Yariv , Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and professor of electrical engineering; the project was led by postdoctoral scholar Christos Santis (PhD '13) and graduate student Scott Steger. Light is capable of carrying vast amounts of information-approximately 10,000 times more bandwidth than microwaves, the earlier carrier of long-distance. But to utilize this potential, the laser light needs to be as spectrally pure-as close to a single frequency-as possible. The purer the tone, the it can carry, and for decades researchers have been trying to develop a laser that comes as close as possible to emitting just one frequency. Today's worldwide optical-fiber network is still powered by a laser known as the distributed-feedback semiconductor (S-DFB) laser, developed in the mid 1970s in Yariv's research group.
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