Scientists' Work Named Best of Year by Optical Society

Telephone calls of the future may be clearer, television pictures brighter, and Internet connections faster and more reliable, thanks to the award-winning work of Turan Erdogan, assistant professor of optics, and other Rochester scientists.

Erdogan and his team at the Institute of Optics have developed a new device that monitors the efficiency of individual fiber optic lines, the hair-sized filaments of light that are expected to form the backbone of electronic communications systems of the future.

The device, which is smaller than an inchworm, can sense if the fiber is losing bits of data and instantly request that the signal be rerouted.

Traditionally, such sensitive devices take up as much space as a toaster, severely limiting where they can operate. But the new device has no moving parts and could fit anywhere the fiber goes.

"It's like a line-tester for the fiber optic age," Erdogan says. "Instead of pulling out an oscilloscope whenever you think there's a problem, each fiber would monitor itself and let you know when there is trouble."

That will become increasingly important as communication companies replace with fast fiber optics the copper wires that currently connect most businesses and homes.

The change will require a different approach to keeping track of communications networks.

"Network monitoring is more important for fiber optics than it is for copper lines because there's not much you can do with copper besides send a signal down it," Erdogan says. "It either works or it doesn't. But in four or five years when the next generation of fiber optic communications hits, the complexity of the networks will make it much more important to know the exact condition of every line, everywhere, instantly."

Erdogan was one of several Rochester optics faculty recognized by the Optical Society of America for conducting outstanding research in 1999.

Others include:

Professor Robert Boyd was cited for his work on a device that more efficiently encodes information into the light carried by a fiber. By carefully placing together layers of certain materials billionths of an inch thick, Boyd and Robert Nelson '98 (PhD) were able to vary the direction laser light would bounce from the device, allowing them to send information along a fiber like ultrafast Morse code.

Professor Dennis Hall and then graduate student Howard Stuart were recognized for demonstrating a way for new generations of ultrathin chips to be read using light signals.

The work may overcome a dilemma in the chip industry: New silicon microchips are so thin that most light passes through them without creating the needed electric currents in the chips.

Professor Ian Walmsley and his team created a method called Spectral Phase Interferometry for Direct Electric-field Reconstruction (SPIDER) to measure the shape and duration of the extremely brief optical pulses generated by ultrafast lasers. Such measurements can guide engineers in making better lasers and fiber optic systems.

Assistant professor Lukas Novotny was cited for developing a way to create molecular "pictures" using laser light that may be especially useful in probing tiny material structures in next-generation semiconductor chips.

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