Touch of glass

Researchers from

have developed next-generation optical fibres that they claim could lead to faster and more powerful computing and telecommunications technologies.

The technology is the result of a change in the fabrication procedure which cuts the production time of hollow-core optical fibres from around a week to a day, reducing the overall cost.

Jonathan Knight from the Centre for Photonics and Photonic Materials at Bath's Department of Physics said the development challenges both the conventional design and production of optical fibres.

'We have a new design for the fibre, but to manufacture that design we needed to completely revise our fabrication procedure,' he said.

In standard optical fibres, light travels in a small cylindrical core of glass running down the fibre length. Hollow-core fibres provide better performance, but fabricating the special kind of fibre needed to guide light down an air hole is difficult. Also, until now, the fibres worked for only a limited range of wavelengths.