Researchers have just set a new record for data transmission. Using one small computer chip, they moved 1.84 petabits of data per second. That equals 122 million Netflix movies streaming at the same time.
“We have transferred all of that at once,” says Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen. He is a physicist affiliated with the Technical University of Denmark and also the University of Copenhagen.
That’s truly impressive, notes Bill Corcoran. Previously, such a feat would have taken many chips and consumed far more energy. Corcoran is a physicist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He was not involved in this research. But he knows a lot about this field. Since 2020, his group had held the record for the highest data-transmission rate using a single chip.
“It’s great to see records being broken at this pace,” Corcoran says.
The Danish team reported its new feat in Nature Photonics on October 20, 2022.
These researchers took advantage of a special phenomenon of light called an optical frequency comb. To make one, you take a laser and shine it through a special chamber. Out pops a carefully crafted rainbow, with all of its colors spaced out evenly. “My 6-year-old son calls these rainbow lasers,” says Corcoran.
The researchers who first figured out how to turn laser light into this special type of rainbow shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in physics. But their technique relied on large machines, “the size of a double bed,” says Corcoran.
In 2007, Tobias Kippenberg was part of a team that figured out how to do the same thing using tiny chips. Rainbows produced this way are now called microcombs. Kippenberg works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. This discovery was “rewarding and exciting,” he says. Back then, he adds, “I would not have dreamed of the field as it is today.”
Microcombs can act like tiny rulers to help make extremely precise measurements. Scientists are using them to…
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