Fiber Optics

Echo-less light beams from CUDOS could improve turbid-media imaging

Oct. 14, 2015

CUDOS has demonstrated a phenomenon first proposed in 1948 but never before observed experimentally: echo-less light.

An illustration shows light traveling in an optical fiber.

Research published in Nature Photonics describes how a collaborative team of researchers from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) have demonstrated a phenomenon first proposed in 1948 but had never before been observed experimentally: echo-less light.

Creating special states of light that have no echoes, the team developed a method that allows waves of light, sound, or radio to travel through complex scattering objects yet have the entire wave arrive at once at its point of destination, echo-free.

Joel Carpenter, a lecture at the University of Queensland who designed and performed the experiments, likened the waves of light to yelling a message to a friend at the end of a tunnel. "Because of the way the sound waves bounce off walls and other objects the message your friend receives will be distorted by echoes and they might not be able to understand you," Carpenter said. "Now imagine you had a specially shaped horn or speaker which launched your voice into the tunnel in a very special shape so that somehow no echoes arrive at the other end. We've demonstrated the same idea, except using light bouncing around inside an optical fibre."

Jochen Schroeder from RMIT University who led the project highlighted the importance of this discovery by saying, "The ability to make light pass through an object and arrive all at once at the other end is important in many fields. For example, the scattering of light in biological tissue [or turbid media] such as skin or brain [tissue] limits the depth that can be imaged," Schroeder added. "Techniques such as these mitigate this scattering and allow imaging of depths inside tissue which would not otherwise be possible. We demonstrated this new phenomenon using light waves in optical fibres by precisely measuring the way light travels through the fibre in space and time. Then we worked out what laser beam shapes would travel through without echoes, generated beams of those shapes, and put them into the fibre, before confirming that all the light arrives simultaneously at the other end."

CUDOS director and senior researcher on this project, professor Benjamin Eggleton, noted that although the researchers used light, it is also applicable to other waves such as Wi-Fi, sound waves, radio, and mobile phones. "Essentially, this could be applied to any application whereby you want the entire wave to arrive at the other end at the same time so your signal doesn't get garbled by echoes."

CUDOS is a research consortium between seven Australian Universities: The University of Sydney (main host of CUDOS); Macquarie University; University of Technology Sydney; Australian National University; Swinburne University of Technology; RMIT University; and Monash University. CUDOS is funded by the Australian Research Council under their Centres of Excellence program.

SOURCE: ARC CUDOS; http://www.cudos.org.au/news/2015-10-26_EcholessLight.shtml

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.