SIGMA XI - NJIT CHAPTER

In the beginning of optical communications in 1880, Alexander Graham Bell sent light through air. The idea didn't work very well. In 1972, rival groups at Corning and Bell Labs launched a communications revolution with the development of optical fiber made from sand (SiO2). Since then they have competed fiercely to make glass as clear as possible, battling to reach the clarity limit. Five years ago, progress reached a stand-still, with an amazing level of clarity: in a clear fiber, you could almost see forever (if you looked in a narrow range of wavelengths). At that point, I formed a group, armed with physics, to launch a new assault on the clarity limit. We quickly confirmed that light was lost because of Raleigh scattering, multi-phonon scattering and absorption by water. We set to work to squeeze out the last impurity: the water. We measured and ex-plained mathematically how water seeped into the blazing hot, flowing glass during the fiber manufacturing process. Based on our understanding of the physics, we patented a new process and Lucent has now made dry fiber, substantially expanding the communications bandwidth and, possibly, achieving the clarity limit.

BIOGRAPHY

Gordon Thomas (Brown, Sc.B., physics, 1965; University of Rochester, Ph.D., physics, 1972) has been a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories (now a division of Lucent Technologies) since 1972, except for extended visits on the faculty at Harvard University (1977, 1985-86) and the University of Tokyo (1981). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is currently work-ing on a mixture of basic and applied research. He has published more than 125 papers, primarily on basic, experimental physics, in a range of fields including superconductivity, the metal-insulator transition and semiconductors, with an emphasis on optical spectroscopy. He has recently played a leadership role in the development of a new product to identify materials with an electronic eye.

For information, contact Dr. Ken Chin: at (973)596-3297 or at   chin@megahertz.njit.edu

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