Stressed-out laser diode may deliver 200Gb/s data rates

Enlarge / Laser beams illuminating unit of Diode Pumped Green Laser. (credit: Forrest Anderson | The LIFE Images Collection | Getty Images)

The data usage of the modern world is absolutely mind-boggling. We have giant, air-conditioned buildings dedicated to shuffling bits around at high speed. And for what? To ensure that Instagram can tell Facebook to tell its advertisers that you really love rubber duckies.

Vicious truth-telling aside, the infrastructure underlying data centers is based on lasers that are modulated at high speed. Thanks to some recently published research, however, the latest and greatest of the hardware currently in our data centers will start to look very slow. A speed-up of about a factor of 10 may be just around the corner.

Birefringence is your friend

It turns out that the key to making a laser go faster is to make it a bit shoddy. Let’s break that down.