Bright Ideas — Detection Of Terahertz Waves, Transmission Of High-Speed Data With Minimal Heat, And More
By John Oncea, Editor
Bright Ideas presents the most captivating news and innovations in optics and photonics. This week, we look at time-sequential color code division multiplexing holographic display with metasurface, the development of an accurate method of controlling optical circuits on fingernail-sized photonic integrated circuits, and more.
Opto-Electronic Advances (via EurekAlert!) issued a publication discussing time-sequential color code division multiplexing holographic display with metasurface. In it, the authors “propose multiwavelength code division multiplexing (CDM) metasurface holography via combining birefringent metasurface and introduce the concept of CDM from communication technology. According to the basic principle of CDM, a series of codes are selected as "keys" to encode and decode the information. The authors optimized the coded reference and introduced multiwavelength channels to encode the information of both references and target scene into a single metasurface for optical data recording and reconstruction in a large number of channels.”
According to Phys.org, a research team has successfully detected terahertz waves with a fast response and high sensitivity at room temperature. The team was led by Associate Professor Akira Satou, from Tohoku University’s Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC), and Hiroaki Minamide, from the RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics. “The group’s success was accomplished thanks to a new principle that enabled the detection operation even within the simplest transistor device,” writes Mirage.News. “We used a unipolar type transistor with graphene where only electrons were involved,” said Satou. “Additionally, the same type of metals can be employed for all electrodes.” Looking ahead, Satou and his team plan to build upon their epoch-making achievement by improving the device's performance.
iTWire.com reports that Monash University, RMIT, and the University of Adelaide have researched to develop an accurate method of controlling optical circuits on fingernail-sized photonic integrated circuits. The development builds on the work of the same team that created the world’s first self-calibrated photonic chip. “We’ve added a common reference path to the chip, which enables stable and accurate measurements of the lengths (phases, time delays) and losses of the ‘workhorse’ paths,” said Monash University research fellow professor Mike Xu. “By inventing a new method, the fractional delay method, we have been able to separate out the wanted information from the unwanted making for more precise applications.”
Engineers at Caltech and the University of Southampton have teamed up to design an electronics chip integrated with a photonics chip, reports Hackster.io. The chip is capable of transmitting high-speed data with minimal heat and the research team states “that the two-chip sandwich could influence the future of data centers that handle large amounts of data communication. The towers of servers in data centers are notorious for the amount of heat generated while processing data, which means the new chip could reduce that heat, allowing for increased data throughput.”
The Optica Foundation issued details on the information research being funded by its 20th Anniversary Challenge. From photonic integration and nanotechnology to free-space optical communication strategies, recipients’ work advances alternative approaches to traditional optical communications in light of growing demand. “As we approach the limits of Moore’s Law, we need to seek new ways of addressing the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth,” said Andrew Forbes, a member of the 20th Anniversary Challenge Selection Committee. “The research being conducted by Challenge recipients explores potential paths that respond to the growing workload that’s been building on existing communications capacity.”