looking at past trends we could guess that we're going to be wanting to send
more and more data at higher higher rates so if you upload a video to Facebook for
example, Facebook is storing your video until someone asked for it. So if you
suddenly say now I want to see my dog bouncing down the hall again now
Facebook has to figure out where they stored it and get all that data bring it
right to your computer almost as fast as you asked for it or if suddenly this
video goes viral and everybody across the united states wants to see your dog
bouncing down the hall Facebook has gotta be able to figure out how to get that data
to everybody as fast as they can as soon as people ask for it. We're running up
against the limit of what electricity can do. Regular electric wires you
try to get more and more data on there they start to heat up and the
wires also start to interfere with one another and so what we found is that if
we send data down these fiber optics made out of glass that can transport
light from one place to another
then suddenly we can fit a lot more information on one strand of glass than
we ever could
on a wire. We want to try and use those same advantages that we got from fiber
optics not only between computers but now within computers as well. We want to
make lasers at or about a hundred times thinner than the diameter of a single
human hair so these lasers need to be microscopic to fit in well among all the
other microscopic components on the chip and so there's lots of researchers who
are working on how to shrink all these components down and get them to talk to
each other.
the lasers that we're making now are actually circular and that's called a
whispering gallery laser and it's named after the whispering galleries in
cathedrals that have big domes and if somebody is standing in the right spot
clear on the other side of the cathedral they can actually hear you even if you
whisper because the sound waves are bouncing along the edge of this
cathedral and reaching the listener on the other side. In the same way in
these circular lasers that we've set up we actually have set up our cavities so
the light bounces around the edge of the cavity and ends up at the original spot
right in step with it. So the pictures are pretty too actually go as I'm sitting
there at my computer sort of testing out these different laser designs I'll get
to see these pictures of flowers and these sort of wonderful circularly
symmetric patterns coming up on my screen that's very satisfying