Study sheds new light on performance under stress
Physicists in Britain has done the maths on optical fibre and found a way to make it more fault tolerant and robust. Their topological work found a work around to a problem at the core of this fragile medium, the fact that fibre can get bent of shape at the slightest touch. Now they have a formula to make the popular backhaul technology deal with stress more easily and cope with bigger workloads in future.
Though optical fibre has massively improved on copper cable’s groundwork for mobile backhaul networks, its cables can’t cope with being twisted or bent. Scientists in England’s University of Bath have had an eureka moment and found a solution to this design flaw, reports Ioanna Lykiardopoulou in The Next Web. Their work looked at the three elements: the core, the cladding, and the coating. When installed in a network, the core of fibre, the pathway for light that is created inside the cladding, can get twisted and bent, said Physics PhD student Nathan Roberts who led the research.
The manufacture of fibre-optic cable inevitable leads to small variations in the physical structure of the fibre and these distortions darken the light’s optimum pathway, degrading the signal between sender and receiver. Roberts’ team counters the effect of variations and defects by building more robustness into the fibre design. In searching for a solution topology, the mathematical study of the properties of geometrical objects that remain unchanged despite deformation, twisting and stretching, was called for, Roberts said. It has already been applied to physics and light research, but the Bath study is pioneering its use in optical fibre.
The physicists created a fibre that borrows from the lessons of topology and adds several light-guiding cores in the fibre, linked together in a spiral. Light can still travel between these cores, but is now designed to be trapped within the edge. These edge states are shielded from disorder in the overall structure. “By adapting optical fibres with topological design, researchers will have the tools to pre-empt and forestall signal-degrading effects by building inherently robust photonic systems,” Dr Anton Souslov, co-author of the study, explained. Currently, the researchers are looking for industry partners to further develop their concept for improving today’s backhaul network. The study has shown that fibre manufacturers can make miles of their ‘topological fibre’ wound around a spool.
The university is also keen to get the technology in front of the designers of tomorrow’s quantum networks where information could be transmitted across continents using the same topological principles, according to Roberts. The supporting networks for Quantum technology have to keep pace with a leap in storing and processing information but the quantum states of light with transfer information can be easily affected by the environment, which will present a massive. The study could be a design for preserving quantum information in optical fibres, the University claimed.