This is in current issue of Business Week. Not sure how Lumenon does it but this confirms that the technology is feasible. Bob.
Bending Light with a New Breed of Fiber Optics
Optical fibers are often called light pipes. That name turns out to be much more accurate than previously imagined. Unlike ordinary optical fibers, which are solid glass, a new breed of hair-thin glass fibers has a hollow core for piping light.
Making these wispy glass straws is more complicated than 'pulling' a solid fiber--a process that is similar to stretching a wad of taffy until it's a thread many yards long. So the hollow-core fibers produced by a team of British researchers at the University of Bath, described in the Sept. 3 issue of Science, may have only limited potential in telecommunications. However, what the new fibers promise to do over short hauls is astonishing.
For one thing, they can pipe light around 90-degree corners. That means optical chips suddenly become feasible. Today, optical chips are uneconomically large because solid fibers leak light at sharp corners, so optical circuits now have to turn gentle curves. The hollow-core variation avoids corner leaks with some optical trickery: patterns of holes in the glass too small for photons to squeeze through. Contrary to what you'd expect, adding holes transforms the glass into a light insulator.
Theoretically, tiny holes can also be used to create novel beams of interacting light, according to John B. Pendry, head of physics at London's Imperial College. Normally, light beams just pass right through each other. But interacting beams could perform switching, like transistors. Thus, all-optical chips and computers--operating at speeds way beyond current electronic models--may be on the horizon. |
