Use light-bending materials to slow and separate light signals, and thus speed up the Internet. That’s the advice of some scientists, who are saying that new materials that can potentially render objects invisible could also help the Net overcome its most persistent bottlenecks.
Jet, Hand-Delivery, Jet
Long-distance traffic over the Internet travels via fiber-optic cables, which relay streams of information in different channels as different frequencies of light. But, as they get routed to the last legs of their journey, the signals are converted back into electrical impulses and separated, and then are often converted back into light for the final haul.
That separation is currently the slowest part of the long-distance journey, with time being lost in the conversion to and from electrical signals.
It’s as if a letter were sent cross-country by jet, and then had to be hand-delivered to a local post office before being put on another jet to complete its journey to another country. The total journey is governed by the slowest component, which, in this case, is electronic.
But keeping the transmission entirely as light could have a profound effect on the total transmission speed. Dr. Chris Stevens of the University of Oxford told the BBC News that light-based transmission “can quite cheerfully sustain a couple of terahertz, but your electronics can’t do more than a few gigahertz.”
Enter metamaterials.
Optical Computers, Higher-Density Discs
Metamaterials have been in the news recently as the possible building blocks, someday, for invisibility cloaks and other such fantastical products. They are designed to deliberately slow down light and bend it. Bending light around an object could, theoretically, render it invisible.
But this ability to control light also makes metamaterials attractive for speeding up optical networks. The materials can bend light backward in a process known as negative refraction, and, if used in a network, could split light…