#optical fiber

"Scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, have found a powerful new way to program optical circuits that are critical to the delivery of future technologies such as unhackable communications networks and ultrafast quantum computers.

"Light can carry a lot of information, and optical circuits that compute with light—instead of electricity—are seen as the next big leap in computing technology," explains Professor Mehul Malik, an experimental physicist and Professor of Physics at Heriot-Watt's School of Engineering and Physical Sciences.

"But as optical circuits get bigger and more complex, they're harder to control and make—and this can affect their performance. Our research shows an alternative—and more versatile—way of engineering optical circuits, using a process that occurs naturally in nature.""

"Professor Malik said the power of light was in its multiple dimensions.

"We can encode a lot of information on a single particle of light," he explained. "On its spatial structure, on its temporal structure, on its color. And if you can compute with all of those properties at once, that unlocks a massive amount of processing power.""

Lightly Scrambled

Light carries pictures – firing chemical reactions at the backs of our eyes, or along optical fibres from inside the body, revolutionising surgery. Aiming to improve the resolution of endoscopes, here a team of physicists experiment with thinner fibres – comparing patterns of light that emerge after blurring and bending along the fibre, they aim to reassemble a 'memory' of the original picture. But there’s a problem – the fibres have to move, twist and turn to peek inside tissues, often scrambling the light into beautiful, but confusing patterns like these. Undefeated, the scientists take inspiration from astronomy, where guiding stars are used as reference points to orientate light from distant galaxies. Bright fluorescent particles on the tip of fibres in new endoscopes may help in a similar way, unscrambling detailed pictures of individual cells, and ultimately saving lives.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Shuhui Li and colleagues, University of Exeter

Physics and Astronomy, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Nature Communications, June 2021

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