Charles Kao được Nobel vật lý 2009
Ngô Quang Hưng | 06 tháng 10, 2009 | 
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Charles Kao — (một trong những) nhà tiên phong của truyền thông cáp quang — là một trong 3 người nhận giải Nobel Vật Lý 2009. Kao được nửa giải, hai bác kia được 1/4.
Không có cáp quang thì đừng hòng các bạn chơi game qua mạng, skype về VN, xem youtube, hay làm thời trang. Nếu cuốn tất cả các cáp quang trên thế giới vòng quanh quả đất thì được đến 25000 vòng. Đó là một bộ nhớ khổng lồ.
Cáp quang còn dùng làm gì?
Sorry i can not type Vietnamese. Well, besides its applications in communications, optical fibers are being investigated extensively for various usages in many other fields. For telecommunication applications, the benefit of optical fiber is that light is guided through a long length of glass fiber with very small spot size which means that optical intensity is very high. Therefore, it is more efficient to make optical devices based on the optical nonlinear effect (optical intensity dependent refractive index of material) for switching, wavelength converting, broadband light sources… high-speed optical fiber connectting computers directly may facilitate real-time cloud computing. Fiber laser offers comparably high power to its bulk counterpart while being much cheaper, nearly maintanaince-free, excellent beam size and can be easily intergrated to robot arms… fiber optic sensors have advantages of light weight, electromagnetic immunity, distributed sensing fashion on a single optical fiber. In fact distributed fiber optic sensing network might serve as the “nerve” system for robots in the future (right now it is possible for human to “ask”, for exmample an 1-meter long material with embedded fiber optic sensor, questions such as: are your hurt, burned, or feeling chemical contact somewhere on your body, with the resolution of something around 10 cm…)… fiber optic based entangled photon pair generation may help to form ultra-secured quantum communications… and many things else.
There ere also many issues and among them cost is the most serious one. It is quite strange since guys in the fiber optic community did so well on cutting cost for telecommunications (the cost of optrical fiber for long-haul telecommunications is something like 10$ for more than 1km now and i think it almost goes the material-cost limit) but are taking so long time to do the same thing with fiber optic applications in other field.