Guest_Jim_* Posted July 30, 2015 Posted July 30, 2015 In order to send information using photons, it is necessary to modulate the optical signal to encode the data. While optical modulators do exist, they are fairly bulky, inefficient, and expensive. That is set to change though, thanks to researchers at ETH Zurich. The researchers have created a new modulator design that exploits plasmon-polaritons, which are combinations of electromagnetic fields and electrons, inheriting some of the benefits of both. The primary benefit here is that they allow the optical information to be fit into a much smaller space than photons would allow, as it is now electrons carrying the information. To actually create the modulator though, the researchers take inspiration from optics to create a plasmonic interferometer. It works by splitting the plasmon-polaritons into two half signals, passing these down different arms, and recombining them after the journey. By varying the refractive index of one of the arms though, the phase of one of the halves can be changed, causing interference in the recombined signal, when it is converted back into photons. This new modulator is made of gold on glass, with an organic material that can have its refractive index change, and it comes in at just 150 nm thick. Being so small it also uses far less power, needing just thousandths of a Watt to achieve a rate of 70 Gbps, which is a hundredth of what current commercial models require. Source: ETH Zurich Back to original news post Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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