Putting on the Pressure Improves Glass for Fiber Optics
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Putting on the pressure improves glass for fiber optics:
Rapid, accurate communication worldwide is possible via fiber optic cables, but as good as they are, they are not perfect. Now, researchers from Penn State and AGC Inc. in Japan suggest that the silica glass used for these cables would have less signal loss if it were manufactured under high pressure.
"Signal loss means that we have to use amplifiers every 80 to 100 kilometers (50 to 62 miles)," said John C. Mauro, professor of materials science and engineering, Penn State. "After that distance, the signal wouldn't be detected properly. Across continents or across oceans that becomes a big deal."
[...] Mauro and his team used molecular simulations to investigate the effects of pressure when making optical fibers. They reported their results in npj Computational Materials. The simulations showed that using pressure quenching of the glass, the Rayleigh scattering loss could be reduced by more than 50%.
[...] Mauro's work is a molecular simulation, but Madoka Ono of AGC Inc.'s Materials Integration Laboratories, who is an associate professor in the Research Institute for Electronic Science at Hokkaido University in Japan, tested bulk pieces of silica glass and found that the results matched the simulation.
Journal Reference:
Yongjian Yang, Osamu Homma, Shingo Urata, et al. Topological pruning enables ultra-low Rayleigh scattering in pressure-quenched silica glass [open], npj Computational Materials (DOI: 10.1038/s41524-020-00408-1)
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