$6.5 million boosts 'slow light' research

team of researchers led by Robert Boyd, professor of optics and physics, has been awarded $6.5 million to show how cutting-edge research, like bringing light to a near halt, can hold promise for optical computing. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded the funding to the group that includes researchers from Rochester, Cornell University, Duke University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Southern California.

"We've got an all-star team tackling some of the toughest problems in all-optical processing," says Boyd. "We've already made significant headway individually, and now we're going to increase our success by combining forces. We're very excited to be working on this."

All-optical signal processing has implications beyond all-optical computers; the telecommunications industry, for instance, shuttles tremendous amounts of data via fiber optics but must convert most of it back and forth to the electrical domain in order to route or process it. A more efficient method would be to process the incoming photons directly, operating at the speed of light and without suffering the inefficiencies associated with the conversion from optical to electrical and back to optical.

Boyd and coworkers at the Institute of Optics developed a way to manipulate light based on their research into room-temperature devices that slow the speed of light to a comparative crawl. Researchers have slowed light before, but Boyd's recent work using lasers and a piece of ruby did so with an incredibly simplistic system. Instead of the complex, room-filling mechanisms previously used to slow light, the new apparatus is small and, in the words of Boyd, "ridiculously easy to implement."

Boyd's device can act as a buffer, either storing optical information for a short time when used in a computer, or as a delay element in a fiber optic transmission line. Like two cars merging on a highway, where one may need to slow down to let another car into the lane, a light-slowing device could help ease congestion on fiber optic lines and simplify the process of merging signals on busy networks.

The DARPA project involves the development of additional means of slowing light, some of which may prove more suitable than the ruby approach for specific applications.

Maintained by University Public Relations
Please send your comments and suggestions to:
Public Relations.