Squeezing light into metals: A new way to increase your data rate

Ajay Nahate and Barun Gupta two electrical engineering professors from University of Utah found a new way to carry information using lights in metals. For this they used an inexpensive inject printer of around $60 and which consist of silver and carbon ink cartridges. This invention will be very useful to rapidly fabricate superfast components in electronic devices and to make wireless technologies faster.

Light transmitted through optical fiber is a thing which really matters when it comes to high speed Internet and data transfer. If we shrink these fibers, then more data can be packed into it but to a certain limit, which becomes the biggest drawback of optical fibers. And if we use electronic circuits, then it can be fashioned at much smaller sizes on silicon wafers, but we won't get the expected bandwidth. So, a drawback here too.

Now, a new technology called plasmonics take the best aspects from both optical fiber and electronic circuit i.e high data transfer rate from optical fiber and high data carrying capacity from electronic devices. Data can be transmitted at much higher rate by crowding light into metal structure with dimensions much smaller than its wavelength. The rate of data transfer is very close to terahertz. Ajay Nahate, professor of electrical and computer engineering and senior author of the new technology says that currently we have very few well developed technologies which provides a bandwidth in terahertz, through which we can make wireless devices such as bluetooth which operates at 2.4 gigahertz frequency which is 1000 times faster than currently available.

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