Physorg March 16, 2018 Researchers in the UK created an optical version of a diode by sending lots of light into a microresonator and harnessing the circulating optical power to generate the diode effect. As the microrings can store extremely large amounts of light, even though they were sending small amounts of light into the glass rings, the circulating power was comparable to the light generated by the flood lights. They have shown that the electromagnetic field of clockwise circulating light in these glass rings effectively blocks any counterclockwise circulating light. The research opens the door to cheap and efficient […]
Tag Archives: optical communication
Researchers use sound waves to advance optical communication
Physorg January 22, 2018 There are several problems with using magnetically responsive materials to achieve the one-way flow of light in a photonic chip. Researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, produced a non-reciprocal modulator by means of indirect interband scattering. They broke the time-reversal symmetry using a two-dimensional acoustic pump that simultaneously provides a non-zero overlap integral for light–sound interaction and satisfies the necessary phase-matching. Their device is 200 by 100 microns in size, made of aluminum nitride. Sound waves, produced using tiny electrodes written directly onto the aluminum nitride, compel light within the device to travel only in […]