Putting an electronic switch at the junction between two optical fibre cables slows the signal down.
Telephone companies, such as Verizon, are rolling out optical fibre to the home to do the same.
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Research into materials such as Kevlar, optical fibre and steel is at the heart of the business.
This generates the coherent light of a laser beam in the core of a long, thin optical fibre.
Another example involved creating "light pipes" as a 3D-printed alternative to optical fibre.
Patients are injected with the drug, and then have a catheter carrying an optical fibre threaded into the vessel to be treated.
Moreover, engineers have worked out how to make laser beams more intense by using short lengths of optical fibre to narrow the beam.
It leads in supplying data storage devices that connect to host computers via optical fibre networks to transmit masses of data over long distances.
Twelve to 36 hours later, when enough shells have accumulated, you insert an optical fibre into the tumour, and deliver an appropriate blast of infra-red.
The arrival of fresh competitors could also lead it to accelerate the introduction of optical fibre to the home it is currently due only in 2010.
Besides, optical fibre is slowly working its way up his hillside.
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But the optical switch takes the flickers of lights flashing by and, with the use of its micro-mirrors, redirects them from one optical fibre to another.
To do so, he dipped the end of an optical fibre into a bead of molten gallium, then allowed the gallium to freeze, creating the mirror.
It leads in supplying data storage devices that connect to host computers via optical fibre networks to transmit masses of data over long distances without clogging up other operations.
In this week's Science, Jonathan Knight and his colleagues at the University of Bath, in Britain, report the production of an optical fibre that guides light using this phenomenon.
Engineers will ultimately lay around 17, 500km of optical fibre cable and install around 3, 000 new fibre broadband cabinets in streets across Wales to improve broadband speeds and benefit homes and businesses.
Quantum key distribution does this by encoding the information in the polarisation states of individual photons, the particles of light, which are sent from Alice to Bob over an optical fibre.
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At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos used an evolutionary algorithm to come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length.
The optical fibre network at the heart of the effort makes use of the same types of fibres that transmit data to homes and across oceans, in which light bounces along the fibres' length.
Sending large amounts of information down an optical fibre is done by encoding many separate streams of data as pulses of light of different colours, so that they can travel along the fibre without interfering with each other.
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But more is needed: many want an optical-fibre backbone to reach every corner of the country.
The researchers at Almaden hope to push that up to 10 gigabits a second soon a rate comparable with the best optical-fibre connections.
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Across Pakistan, roads are being excavated and optical-fibre cables laid.
One example the company has developed is a crystal fibre that squeezes light into such a narrow core that the intensity of the light modifies the optical properties of the glass itself.
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