Optics Trailblazers Are Still At ItOptics Trailblazers Are Still At It

At the end of the Trojan War, in approximately 1200 B.C., King Agamemnon used a series of signal fires to send a message to his palace: The war was won, and he was coming home. Today, researchers call that the first optical communication system. We've come a long way since then, using photons instead of fire.

On Dec. 4 at Columbia University in New York, telecommunications researchers honored two of their own, awarding the prestigious 27th annual Marconi International Fellowship Awards to Herwig Kogelnik and Allan Snyder. Not only have these two pioneers revolutionized the way we communicate, but they continue to drive exciting advances.

Kogelnik, 69, has spent the last 40 years as a researcher at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., where he helped invent a wide range of optical equipment, including distributed feedback lasers, which are essential in optical systems.

Kogelnik began his acceptance speech with the story of King Agamemnon but, he said, the real optic revolution began when the laser was invented in 1960.

Today, he's working on ways to improve optical systems. "Optical fiber communications are transmitting at higher and higher speeds and capacities," he says, "but there are some key obstacles that people are worried about."

One of the strengths of fiber-optic cables is that they can carry multiple signals, as long as each signal is polarized differently. But the more data that's sent, the more likely that the signals will interfere with each other. Kogelnik is exploring the obscure details of how polarization works. Once that's better understood, researchers will be able to build increasingly higher-capacity optical fibers.

Snyder, 61, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, has been described in the Australian press as one of the country's most creative minds. His research bears that out: His studies into how the eyes of flies work led to major advances in fiber optics. Today, he's breaking ground in the area of virtual circuitry, which would eliminate the need for optical fibers.

"Light, when interacting with glass, can kind of guide and manipulate itself," he explains. "So two beams can steer each other, two beams can switch each other off and on. A little cube of glass would basically have circuitry that could erase and reconfigure itself." These rewriteable circuits could serve as low-power, low-heat, high-speed alternatives to microchips.