Fiber Optics
What is fiber optics?
We're used to the idea of information traveling in different ways.
When we speak into a landline telephone, a wire cable carries the
sounds from our voice into a socket in the wall, where another cable
takes it to the local telephone exchange. Cellphones work a different
way: they send and receive information using invisible radio waves
a technology called wireless because it uses no cables. Fiber optics
works a third way. It sends information coded in a beam of light down
a glass or plastic pipe. It was originally developed for endoscopes in
the 1950s to help doctors see inside the human body without having
to cut it open first. In the 1960s, engineers found a way of using the
same technology to transmit telephone calls at the speed of light
(normally that's 186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second in a
vacuum, but slows to about two thirds this speed in a fiber-optic
cable)
Optical technology
A fiber-optic cable is made up of incredibly thin strands of glass or
plastic known as optical fibers; one cable can have as few as two
strands or as many as several hundred. Each strand is less than a
tenth as thick as a human hair and can carry something like 25,000
telephone calls, so an entire fiber-optic cable can easily carry several
.million calls
Fiber-optic cables carry information between two places using entirely
optical (light-based) technology. Suppose you wanted to send
information from your computer to a friend's house down the street
using fiber optics. You could hook your computer up to a laser, which
would convert electrical information from the computer into a series of
light pulses. Then you'd fire the laser down the fiber-optic cable. After
traveling down the cable, the light beams would emerge at the other
end. Your friend would need a photoelectric cell (light-detecting
component) to turn the pulses of light back into electrical information
his or her computer could understand. So the whole apparatus would
be like a really neat, hi-tech version of the kind of telephone you can
!make out of two baked-bean cans and a length of string
How fiber-optics works
Light travels down a fiber-optic cable by bouncing repeatedly off the
walls. Each tiny photon (particle of light) bounces down the pipe like
a bobsleigh going down an ice run. Now you might expect a beam of
light, traveling in a clear glass pipe, simply to leak out of the edges.
But if light hits glass at a really shallow angle (less than 42 degrees),
it reflects back in againas though the glass were really a mirror.
This phenomenon is called total internal reflection. It's one of the
.things that keeps light inside the pipe
The other thing that keeps light in the pipe is the structure of the
cable, which is made up of two separate parts. The main part of the
cablein the middleis called the core and that's the bit the light
travels through. Wrapped around the outside of the core is another
layer of glass called the cladding. The cladding's job is to keep the
light signals inside the core. It can do this because it is made of a
different type of glass to the core. (More technically, the cladding has
a lower refractive index.)
Types of fiber-optic cables
Optical fibers carry light signals down them in what are
called modes. That sounds technical but it just means different ways
of traveling: a mode is simply the path that a light beam follows down
the fiber. One mode is to go straight down the middle of the fiber.
Another is to bounce down the fiber at a shallow angle. Other modes
.involve bouncing down the fiber at other angles, more or less steep
The simplest type of optical fiber is called single-mode. It has a very
thin core about 5-10 microns (millionths of a meter) in diameter. In a
single-mode fiber, all signals travel straight down the middle without
bouncing off the edges (red line in diagram). Cable TV, Internet, and
telephone signals are generally carried by single-mode fibers,
wrapped together into a huge bundle. Cables like this can send
.information over 100 km (60 miles)
Another type of fiber-optic cable is called multi-mode. Each optical
fiber in a multi-mode cable is about 10 times bigger than one in a
single-mode cable. This means light beams can travel through the
core by following a variety of different paths (purple, green, and blue
lines)in other words, in multiple different modes. Multi-mode cables
can send information only over relatively short distances and are
.used (among other things) to link computer networks together
Even thicker fibers are used in a medical tool called
a gastroscope (a type of endoscope), which doctors poke down
someone's throat for detecting illnesses inside their stomach. A
gastroscope is a thick fiber-optic cable consisting of many optical
fibers. At the top end of a gastroscope, there is an eyepiece and a
lamp. The lamp shines its light down one part of the cable into the
patient's stomach. When the light reaches the stomach, it reflects off
the stomach walls into a lens at the bottom of the cable. Then it
travels back up another part of the cable into the doctor's eyepiece.
Other types of endoscopes work the same way and can be used to
inspect different parts of the body. There is also an industrial version
of the tool, called a fiberscope, which can be used to examine things
.like inaccessible pieces of machinery in airplane engines
