SCRATCHED glass could boost data speeds through fibre-optic cables, improving internet bandwidth.
Light signals in a fibre-optic network are regularly cleaned up and retransmitted. This is done by electronic circuits, but electrical impulses travel much slower than light, creating a bottleneck.
Now a team from the University of Sydney and the Australian National University in Canberra has created a thumbnail-sized filter out of glass etched with about 10,000 scratches, spaced roughly a micrometre apart.
The material is doped with sulphur, selenium and tellurium, which broadens the spectrum of frequencies of pulses passing through. The more powerful the pulse, the…
