Honey We have Shrunk the Data Packets in Time…
The data and the internet revolution is going to see another revolution. Researchers have demonstrated a “time telescope” that could squeeze much more information into the data packets sent around the internet. Rather than focusing information-carrying light pulses in space, like a normal lens, it focuses them in time. The telescope comprises laser beams that combine in a tiny silicon structure to compress the pulses. A prototype device, described in Nature Photonics, boosted the data rate of telecoms-wavelength pulses by 27 times.
A general rule in physics is that the shorter a pulse is in time, the higher its “bandwidth” – a measure of the spread of colours within it, and therefore of its information-carrying capacity.
