SUTD: Ju Won Choi, Ezgi Sahin, Byoung-Uk Sohn, George F. R. Chen & Dawn T. H. Tan
A*STAR: Doris K. T. Ng,
MIT: Anuradha M. Agarwal and Lionel C. Kimerling
Photonics researchers demonstrate 11-fold compression of light in time, introducing an important paradigm for light generation in advanced metrology, imaging and high speed optical communications.
Schematic of the USRN compressor system. The system is comprised of separate nonlinear and dispersive stages. For spectral compression (SC), pulses enter the dispersive stage (DS) first before the nonlinear stage (NS), and for temporal compression (TC), pulses enter NS first before DS.
A train carrying cargo has finite space. The amount of cargo that can be carried onboard is limited by the size of the cargo and the capacity of the train. Analogously, the amount of time taken up by an optical signal limits the amount of data that can be carried. Temporally shorter signals allow more data to be squeezed into a given time duration, in a method called optical time division multiplexing. Photonics researchers have recently succeeded in squeezing light in time by 11 times. The developed temporal compression system allows an equivalent increase in the number of bits transmitted by light in a fibre optic network.
You can find more details at https://www.sutd.edu.sg/Research/Research-News/2021/7/Ultra-strong-squeezing-of-light-demonstrated