International News – Adelaide, Australia

ADELAIDE, Australia – Australian researchers are rewriting the rules on how light behaves when confined in ever-smaller optical fibers. Everything has its limits, and light-carrying optical fibers are no exception. Until now, it was thought that, as the size of the optical fiber shrinks, light becomes more and more confined until it reaches a point beyond which it cannot be squeezed any smaller, and it rapidly begins to diverge. This ultimate point was thought to occur when the strand of fiber is just a few hundred nanometers in diameter.



Nos, Shahraam Afhar and colleagues Wen Qi Zhang, Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem and Yanay Monro at the University of Adelaide have discovered that they can push beyond the limit by almost a factor of two. They can do this thanks to a break-through in the theoretical understanding of how light behaves at the nanoscale, and thanks to the use of a new generation of nanoscale optical fibers being developed at the university.

Source: Freebody, Marie. “Pushing Light to New Limits.” Photonics Spectra. 2010: 26.