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Higher Bandwidth for Telecommunications
Dr. Robert Buhrman, Cornell University, EEC-0117770
| Improving the throughput, or bandwidth, of glass optical fibers is a major focus of the telecommunications and computer industries and amplifiers are one of the most important devices in optical networks. Their most obvious use is in boosting the power of light signals so they can go further. But they can also be combined with other devices to make many key components of all-optical networks, including reconfigurable add-drop multiplexers, switches, wavelength converters and signal regenerators. Researchers at the NSEC for Nanoscale Systems in Information Technologies, in a team under the leadership of Professor Frank Wise and in collaboration with Corning, Inc., have succeeded in fabricating lead sulfide (PbS) quantum dot (QD) waveguides in glass. Such waveguides have the potential to provide low-cost, ultra-compact, QD-based waveguide amplifiers that can operate over the full bandwidth of telecommunication fiber. |
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