* Carl Youngblood [Thu, 29 Jul 2004 at 13:20 -0700]
If you read the link I sent, it's actually quite small, and I was wrong in that no crystals are used--just a huge array of carefully-tilted microscopic mirrors.
Wouldn't that be something to have addressing and routing by color, and it used the crystals to send each color down a certain channel? and possibly have some way of changing the colors between stations, etc? You could have multiple connections through single fibres with no bandwidth issues. This would indeed be something very cool.
From what I remember my electromagnetic professor telling me, most fiber optic systems use infrared light. It seems like the reason was that there are issues with the wavelengths of visible light that make infrared light better. I really don't remember that much about it, but what you said triggered something in my memory. I also seem to remember him telling us that optics people still refer to different wavelengths of light, visible or not, as colors.
Just spouting off random half-memories of fiber optics that I have from Dr. Jensen's ECEn 360. That was a great class.
Bryan
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