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World’s First Tunable ‘Photon Copier’ on a Chip
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An interesting discovery leading to all-optical networks was reported last week by Science Daily.
A research team at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) has for the first time incorporated on a single chip both a widely tunable laser and an all-optical wavelength converter, thereby creating an integrated photonic circuit for transcribing data from one color of light to another.
When data is transmitted over the Internet over optical fibers, it is carried by photon streams of different colors. When data arrives to a node, it often needs to change color for the next segment. Until now, this step implied converting photons to electrons, switching electronically, and converting electrons back to photons.