Logo: University of Southern California  Let There Be Leisurely
Light  High-Bandwidth Laser Data Pulses are Made to Dawdle, in a
Controlled Fashion  June 01, 2006 — Increasing interest has
focused recently on ways of drastically slowing light or, more
precisely, the speed of laser data pulses - and a joint USC/Duke
University team has just reported improvements in how to do this
in a flexible and controlled manner. The team was co-led by Alan
Willner, a professor of electrical engineering at the University
of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering who
specializes in photonics, the study of using light to carry and
process information. The results appear in the June issue of the
Journal of Lightwave Technology.  The key parameters are
slowness of the light, maximum data modulation rate, and control
of the delay. The new system, says Willner, "uses simple optical
fiber and can potentially accommodate much higher data rates
than the previous work using exotic atomic vapors.  The slowing
process in fib