Freezing liquid-core fibers boosts light-sound coupling a thousandfold, enabling optoacoustic memory
Researchers froze the liquid core of an optical fiber at -196 °C, achieving over a thousand-times stronger light-sound interaction and demonstrating an optoacoustic memory device.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Leibniz University Hannover and the Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technologies have frozen the liquid core of a hollow-core optical fiber using nitrogen at -196 °C, turning the core material solid without losing its ability to guide light. The solidified section also supports hypersonic acoustic waves, and the resulting Brillouin-Mandelstam scattering is more than 1,000 times stronger than in standard fibers.
Exploiting this amplified interaction, the researchers built an optoacoustic memory that stores information in sound waves before reconverting it to light, a step toward low-energy photonic neuromorphic computing. Project leaders Simon Seiderer and Birgit Stiller note that the platform offers extreme nonlinearities useful for quantum information processing, microwave photonics and high-precision sensing. The work extends earlier liquid-core fiber research by Markus Schmidt and Mario Chemnitz, adding a freezing step that creates a new physical platform for advanced photonic technologies.
Why it matters
The technique could dramatically cut power needs for future photonic computers and enable new quantum and sensing applications.
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