By Patricia Daukantas

Instead of a long blog post, I’m going to post links to several optics-related news items that caught my eye this week.

• A German photonics scientist, Michael Grätzel, has won the Millennium Prize of the Technology Academy Finland for his role in developing dye-sensitized solar cells that mimic photosynthesis. Grätzel heads the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. A Web graphic illustrates the principle behind these so-called Grätzel cells, which have been recently commercialized.

• NIST Tech Beat, a website of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, writes about a recent Optics Express article describing a “dark-pulse” laser. It’s a semiconductor infrared laser that makes dips in light intensity, instead of bursts of light. The scientists at NIST and JILA in Boulder, Colo. (U.S.A.) say that the technology may be useful in signal processing and optical networking.

• A multinational team has used pump-probe spectroscopy to measure electron localization in H₂ and D₂ molecules on the attosecond scale. Of course, this work would not be possible without the development of attosecond lasers. G. Sansone et al. report on this work in the June 10 issue of Nature.

• Finally, Light Reading reports on the impact World Cup fever is going to have on worldwide network traffic. And you thought you were the only one waiting for that “buffering” message to go away so that you can watch your favorite team online….

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The fiber optics community honored its own leader last night with a special two-hour tribute to Charles Kao, considered the founder of fiber optics. This was the first time the entire community has met at its most popular conference following Charlie's elevation to Nobel laureate.

It was in 1966 when Charlie wrote his famous paper with George Hockham suggesting that commerciable levels of photons could transmit voice and data using laser beams over "a glassy" conduit.

Incredibly, the paper's thesis played out. Only four years later, the famous team from Corning made the first optical fibers that met the 20 db/km spec mentioned in the Kao paper as suggesting a potentially commerciable product. This immediately put flesh on the bones of the paper, gave it credibility. There was a path where remaining steps could be played out.

The celebration last night included various aspects of the technology's playing out, including the Corning effort. William Shaver brought the news from the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence in May 1966 that the potential of optical fiber could lead to commercial applications. Corning's Bill Armistead named Robert Maurer to lead a small team. Don Keck and Peter Schultz joined soon thereafter. But glass losses were in the thousands of decibels per kilometer. After much frustration, the team was able to make a fiber that had losses of 17 db/km, which met the standard. Keck wrote in his lab notebook: "Whoopee!"

Corning thereafter decided to put optical fiber into the development phase in 1971. This was followed in 1972 by a further research step forward when gernania doping was added. This led to levels of 4 db/km.

This led to countless depositions and lawsuits as Corning was to successfully defend its patents in the years to come.

Charlie's Nobel speech was repeated by his wife, Gwen, last night. Gwen also gave the speech in Sweden. Charlie, who has Alzheimer's, was at both events but did not further participate.

As Gwen points out, the world knew about the announcement from the Nobel Committee within minutes of its announcement thanks to the fiber optics technology that Charlie had originally founded.

Charlie, who was raised in Shanghai, received special treatment from his parents because two older siblings had died from an epidemic when they were 10 and 12 years of age. He moved to the U.K. for college and stayed thereafter for many years before moving back to China,.He began working at ITT and began research that was to lead to the 1966 paper. His original area of concentration was microwave.

Interestingly, he spent the late 1960s, after publication of the paper, selling the idea of fiber optics around the world--to Japan, Europe and the United States, according to the Nobel speech. "Nothing in our lives was planned. It has been a roller coaster," Gwen observes.

Charlie and Gwen lived in Roanoke, Va. for eight years beginning in 1974. He was named Executive Scientist at ITT and the family moved to Connecticut thereafter.

In the 1980s, Charlie's prophesy that fiber optics would change telecommunications were coming true. Those who recall expensive three minute calls can appreciate how much current calls cost. Gwen suggests that this was the result of fiber optics.

"Charles planted the seed, but it would never have grown without many hands doing the toil," said Gwen. "Charles thanks all those who have worked to do that. And the plant is still growing."

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

We sometimes forget that the service providers need to stay up almost in real time with the varous iterations the Internet is going through. Forget getting over voice to accommdate data. The Internet has metamorphosed far beyond that and is changing almost daily.

"The super-aggregators are changing the way the Internet is configured," says Verizon's Stuart Elby, who spoke at the Service Provider Summit this morning. Up until recently the Internet was "well structured," and then the Googles came along and changed all that, he laments. "You and I used to be albe to connect to the Internet the same way businesses did."

These super aggregators now account for about 50 percent of Internet traffic, Elby calculates. "These hyper-giants are aggregating a lot of content." He calculates there are 30 or 40 main culprits.

One could say they are having a worldwide impact if one is following what is happening in China with Google. Indeed, they are changing the face of the Internet globally. Elby calculates that more than a billion people now use the Internet.

This has caused a big change from Verizon's perspective. "It also has changed how goods and services are paid for on the Internet," he observes.

"The result is that content is being higly consolidated by a small number of hyper giants."

Other changes have included flow from the premise through passive optical networking technology, which in some instances have caused the bottleneck to be pushed farther out into the network. And of course there is the advent of cloud computing.

"In the past we saw a simple number of devices, such as computers and MACs," says Stuart. "More recently we have seen thousands of different types of devices with different formats connected to the network. User content sometimes has to be transformed into hundreds or thousands of different flavors."

But those are not the only changes. Some time in the last two years it became clear that the Internet was being accessed more by mobile devices than fixed devices, according to Stuart. "This concerns me greatly," says Stuart. "Mobile IP which is what most wireless networks are based upon, MIP, are all about simplifying the control at the cost of the tradeoff of not optimizing the router." The result is Verizon is looking for companies to "optimize the routing. Please either optimize or take us away from mobile IP."

There is a good reason Stuart is almost pleading in this request. The company's FiOS fiber to the home build is largely closing down at least for now and the carrier is focusing on wireless technologies next year. It is in a battle with AT&T to build the best wireless network in America, a theme that is being played out in competing national ad campaigns.

With the prospect of bringing 1 gig to the home and potentially 10 gig to the home, Verizon is rapidly upgraiding to 40 gig in the metro space, says Stuart. This is going to the head end if a cable company a central office if a telco.

Is it any wonder that Verizon is the first company to go to 100 gig in its commercial network in North America? "We are quickly going from 10 to 40 to 100 gig all because end users at the bottom are trying to get to the clouds on top," he says referring to a viewgraph he shows.

The end result? "Lots of users are trying to get content from a very few sources," says Stuart. And the bandwidth requirements keep on heading up to the clouds.

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics 

One thing that became very clear when I interviewed Randy Giles, this year's Tyndall award winner, was that he has been involved in a wide array of the seminal breakthroughs that have driven fiber optics in the past 25 years. In the time that Giles career has spanned Northern Telecom and mainly Bell Labs he has been involved with the development of optical amplification, wavelength division mulitiplexing, optical add/drop multiplexers and optical switching--all in a substantive manner.

As part of my interview with him this morning as part of the Fiber Story history series, Randy describes a highly involved career that essentially defined the milestones of optical transport achievement and advancement. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, the modest Giles got his Ph.D in laser physics and initially worked with the legendary Jan Conradi at Bell Northern Research. His initial work was in gigabit optical transmission, which was very exciting at a time when fiber optic systems topped out at 405 Mbps or 560 Mbps.

"I was an neophyte, didn't understand anything about fiber optics," he recalls. "But I did have a background in electronics. Conradi told me to do some homework in fiber optics. Literally a few months later I started working on gigabit fiber optics."

He started working at Bell Labs in 1986, accepting a position from Tingye Li. His almost magical association with optical transport pioneers, which rivaled Forrest Gump-type fortune, was continuing. "I wasn't thinking clearly after offered the job and didn't accept immediately. However I called back 24 hours later and asked Tingye if the job was still available. It was."

Opitcal amplifiers were part of Giles' Ph.D work and his initial research involved semiconductor optical amplifiers. This led to his involvement with optical amplifiers and wavelength division multiplexing, which avoided the crosstalk and other issues of SOAs.Randy is also proud of his efforts in the design modeling of the optical amplifiers themselves.

The competition to develop optical amplifiers in WDM systems was "very intense" in the 1990 timeframe, Randy notes. Yet the competition at least with Southampton University involving David Payne in the U.K. was friendly to an extent. "There was a time when we were looking to the gain characteristics of the optical amplifiers and there seemed to be a discrepancy between their gain feed and our gain feed. We swapped fibers, we exchanged ideas and we found that their fiber composition was different from ours and that explained the shift of the gain and it all sort of resolved itself. So it was a benign competition."

Giles was also involved with some of the first Bragg grating optical add drop multiplexers. "We had the optical amplifiers, the EDFAs. We had to pump them efficiently. "The challenge was to stabilize the 980 pumps. So we had to work with colleagues to provide a narrow feedback into the laser to stabilize itself. So we had gratings and WDM signals so the next thing was to take the gratings and begin to make the next add drop multiplexers. Today of course arrayed waveguides have superceded the gratings but those gratings were very effective in making the first add drop multiplexers."

It was a bit of a departure to start working on MEMS (micro-electrical mechanical systems) from optical add drop multiplexers, Giles relates. He began working with Dave Bishop and others in that area. "I began working with very simple MEMS switches. I realized we could start putting these together. We started making 4x4 and working with Bill Brinkman began working on the lambda router, which went from 256 by 256 to 1296 by 1296."

"I was in the thick of all of these efforts," says Giles, who most recently has been named to head Alcatel-Lucent Korea. It has been a storied career that still has a few twists and turns to go.  

Contributed by C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics    

In a rare historical moment, Robert Maurer, Peter Schulz and Don Keck, the team that originally made the first commerciable optical fibers in the world while at Corning, have been reunited at the show this week. I was humbled to have a few moments to talk to them about their revolutionary discovery, which has created a multi-billion dollar industry and changed the face of communications.

It was clear that Maurer was the leader, a man who began to look into low-loss optical fibers in 1966 when the famouns Kao/Hockham paper was first published. "Things went pretty slow at first and it was clear I was going to need some help," says Maurer. "When I got these two guys to join me, things picked up."

Maurer and the team had no doubt what their mission was, and that telephone companies were running out of capacity. "Everybody knew there were constraints and that optical communications was a possible solution," Keck recalls.

Schulz, who will fully detail the discovery tomorrow night at a special event honoring Charles Kao, remembers that it was actually a visit by a Corning official to the British Ministry of Defence that made the possibility clear. "We were really told very specifically by that Ministry of Defence team to try to make single-mode fiber with about a five micron core and to have attenuations of less than 20 dBs per kilometer. So our goal was to go from that to actually succeed."

None of the three would say they knew they were going to succeed from the outset. "We wanted to try," recalls Maurer. "I don't think anything can be done until it is."

Maurer led the group, Schulz was working with materials, Keck was working with measurements. The fibers were being drawn in the development group."We were really seeing if but using fused silica and putting additives into fused silica to change the refractive index," recalls Maurer. "We were trying to see if that method could lead to an actual fiber. We had no idea whether it could or not."

"Together we kept going forward as we ran our experiments," recalls Schulz.

"We were looking for other glasses that were high in silica at that time," says Maurer.

"Bob always told us if we only do things like everyone else, all you can hope for is a tie," says Keck. "We were looking for a win." Therefore, the team decided to take a contrarian approach. "The contrarian approach was to put an impurity in the glass to raise the refractive index--not enough impurity to impair anythiing. Then you put the silica around it. Ultimately it came to that sort of break that led to our winning solution. But it wasn't exactly like falling off a log."

Not hardly. In fact the early fibers the team worked on had losses of tens of thousands of dBs, recalls Schulz, "higher than the best conventional optical glasses. We worked away at it, picked away at it, and found what the mechanisms were and slowly but surely eliminated the losses until finally after four years of work we ended up finding what worked."

There were actually two eureka moments. The first involved Keck, who had just heated a fiber late in the afternoon in 1970, took the fiber out of the furnace and had a laser beam hooked up. "The laser beam hit the core of the fiber and I was blinded by the light. It was a big blaze of helium neon light and then we went through the measurements and had met our goal," recalls Keck.

Schulz says Eureka II came two years later when the team was struggling to bring the fiber to commercial mode. In the meantime it kept working to try to find other additives to improve it. "In 1972 we made a germania doped silica core fiber. This was multimode. This germania doped fiber we were pulling it and the light kep blazing through the fiber. First loss measurement was four dB per kilometer. We knew we had something."

The team stayed engaged thereafter and got support from idfferent teams and the effort got bigger until literally thousands of researchers were involved

While germania doping was a key, it took many, many years before the first long-haul fiber was used, Keck recalls. In fact, it was 12 years after that initial discovery."When you revolutionize the world, young scientists don't understand how long it takes."

Other problems were knocked out one by one through the expanded groups of researchers at Corning and elsewhere. LEDs were used before problems could be overcome with lasers, including coupling. Corning joined with Siemens to create a cable company known as Siecor. General Cable became involved.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Maurer's advice to young scientists? "Don't be afraid. Go ahead and try it." Adds Keck: "Have a dream. Find somebody to share it with."

Contributed by: C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The celebration began anew this morning for Charles Kao, the father of fiber optics. This is the first time OFC/NFOEC has had the opportunity to honor him since he won the 2009 Nobel prize in physics, an award he shared with two other physicists. To our industry, he is the man, the kingpin, the major domo, the chairman of the board. In short, he is all that and a bag of chips.

Charlie has been honored before. He was so distinguished on the 25th anniversary of the seminal paper he wrote to launch the industry "Dielectric-fibre surface waveguide for optical frequencies" in the United Kingdom in 1966. This was also an OFC, the one in Baltimore in 1991. In fairness, Charlie co-authored the paper with George Hockham. But he was always the driving force, the passionate philosopher king who was given the providential vision the rest of the world lacked.

OFC/NFOEC does many things well. But at the top of the list is conveying a sense history for the fiber optics industry and this strengthens the sense of overall purpose and mission. Much of that is manifested by celebrations and awards such as this. Charlie's award and recognition comes in large part because what flowed out of the paper.

That's because the things in the paper were on-target. Four years after he predicted a silica fiber could transmit commerciable levels of light with acceptable loss (below 20 decibels per kilometer), Corning made it happen through an extraordinary effort. The accompanying lasers and detectors also were fashioned to make it work.

While humble in nature, Charlie has remained committed to fiber optics. This came through in the times I had the opportunity to interview him, also at OFCs. Once in the early 1980s, I asked him if fiber optics would ever be used for undersea transmission. "The oceans will be littered with fiber," he responded. This was six years before TAT-8, the first trans-oceanic fiber network was to be commissioned.

Charlie also predicted that people would use all the broadband that they could get their hands on, and that the costs would come crashing down. This was before we had dial-up service. And more than a few scientists have speculated that it is more than coincidence that Charlie's decision to settle in China some years ago and the rise of Huawei as a major fiber optics powerhouse.

In honoring Charlie this morning, Bell Labs pioneer Tingye Li recall a quote in 2004 that Charlie had made: "If you ask me how long we will see fibers being used, it may be 1,000 years without a replacement."

That's quite a legacy.