‘Slow’ light to speed up the net

August 14, 2008 | Source: BBC News

A huge increase in the speed of the Internet could be produced by using metamaterials to replace the bulky and slow electronics that do the routing of information carried on fiber cables, say researchers at University of California, Berkeley and the University of Oxford.

Metamaterials could be used to temporarily store light signals, with different delays for different light frequencies, achieving an “all-optical network.”