Elon Musk’s SpaceX told Starlink customers they’d have internet service by mid-to late 2021, but some customers say it’s now been delayed to 2022.
The ability to precisely control and change properties of a photon, including polarization, position in space, and arrival time, gave rise to a wide range of communication technologies we use today, including the Internet. The next generation of photonic technologies, such as photonic quantum networks and computers, will require even more control over the properties of a photon.
One of the hardest properties to change is a photon’s color, otherwise known as its frequency, because changing the frequency of a photon means changing its energy.
Today, most frequency shifters are either too inefficient, losing a lot of light in the conversion process, or they can’t convert light in the gigahertz range, which is where the most important frequencies for communications, computing, and other applications are found.
Over the past several decades, researchers have moved from using electric currents to manipulating light waves in the near-infrared range for telecommunications applications such as high-speed 5G networks, biosensors on a chip, and driverless cars. This research area, known as integrated photonics, is fast evolving and investigators are now exploring the shorter—visible—wavelength range to develop a broad variety of emerging applications. These include chip-scale LIDAR (light detection and ranging), AR/VR/MR (augmented/virtual/mixed reality) goggles, holographic displays, quantum information processing chips, and implantable optogenetic probes in the brain.
The one device critical to all these applications in the visible range is an optical phase modulator, which controls the phase of a light wave, similar to how the phase of radio waves is modulated in wireless computer networks. With a phase modulator, researchers can build an on-chip optical switch that channels light into different waveguide ports. With a large network of these optical switches, researchers could create sophisticated integrated optical systems that could control light propagating on a tiny chip or light emission from the chip.
But phase modulators in the visible range are very hard to make: there are no materials that are transparent enough in the visible spectrum while also providing large tunability, either through thermo-optical or electro-optical effects. Currently, the two most suitable materials are silicon nitride and lithium niobate. While both are highly transparent in the visible range, neither one provides very much tunability. Visible-spectrum phase modulators based on these materials are thus not only large but also power-hungry: the length of individual waveguide-based modulators ranges from hundreds of microns to several mm and a single modulator consumes tens of mW for phase tuning. Researchers trying to achieve large-scale integration—embedding thousands of devices on a single microchip—have, up to now, been stymied by these bulky, energy-consuming devices.
Check out the physics courses that I mentioned (many of which are free!) and support this channel by going to https://brilliant.org/Sabine/ where you can create your Brilliant account. The first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.
What are the quantum technologies that are now attracting so much research funding? In this video I go through the most important ones: quantum computing, quantum metrology, the quantum internet, and quantum simulations. I explain what these are all about and how likely they are to impact our lives soon. I also tell you what frequently headline blunders to watch out for.
It’s a web of endless possibilities, but there’s a chance we might find ourselves interwoven in the same old web of Big Tech.
The emergence of blockchain-based technologies such as cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, blockchain, and distributed ledger technology, etc is being seen as the herald of a new era of the internet — a more transparent and open version of the web that would be collectively controlled by users, instead of tech giants like Google and Facebook.
Continue reading “Web 3.0: The New Internet Is About to Arrive” »
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Saturday released its second batch of extended goals for promoting the usage of China’s 5G network and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
IIoT refers to the interconnection between sensors, instruments and other devices to enhance manufacturing efficiency and industrial processes. With a strong focus on machine-to-machine communication, big data and machine learning, the IIoT has been applied across many industrial sectors and applications.
The MIIT announced that the 5G IIoT will be applied in the petrochemical industry, building materials, ports, textiles and home appliances as the 2021 China 5G + Industrial Internet Conference kicked off Saturday in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 16 (Reuters) — Elon Musk and Brazilian Communications Minister Fabio Faria met in Austin on Tuesday to discuss a potential partnership that would leverage SpaceX technology to bring Internet to rural schools and cut back on illegal deforestation.
In a statement, the Brazilian government said the two talked about how SpaceX and Starlink, a satellite broadband service offered by the firm, could help monitor the Amazon rainforest for illegal cutting, while also providing Internet connections to remote schools and health centers.
“We’re working to seal this important partnership between the Brazilian government and SpaceX,” Faria said, according to the statement. “Our objective is to bring Internet to rural areas and remote places, in addition to helping control fires and illegal deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.”
Meet Jaimie and Dave, shipping container homeowners who decided to make their dreams come true by building a tiny house out of shipping containers. On their website, you can follow their incredible tiny house journey and learn everything there is to know about building a tiny home. Their tiny house ambitions began after they realized that no matter how many hours they worked or how much money they saved, keeping up with the others around them was weighing them down. They realized they didn’t want to do it any longer, so the pair took a life-altering decision to change the course of their narrative.
After erecting a little house on their new property, the primary intention was to be mortgage-free. They had a small savings account and some basic abilities. Jaimie is an accountant/controller who has never been afraid of a challenge and enjoys the thrill of problem-solving and thinking outside the box. Dave is a fabricator, so metal was right up his alley, and Jaimie is an accountant/controller who has never been afraid of a challenge and enjoys the thrill of problem-solving and thinking outside the box. They convinced themselves that they could accomplish it and set off on their quest.
They spent months scouring the internet for information on how to build a shipping container home and reading all they could find. They discovered they were practically precisely where they started after months of investigation and study. The couple had no idea how to construct a shipping container home. They discovered the internet, as well as a few of resources from other DIYers, to be somewhat useful, but nothing that worked with what the couple intended to achieve. So they reasoned that putting two metal boxes together and making them livable couldn’t be that difficult, and that it couldn’t be that expensive.
Amazon is planning a satellite internet constellation that could rival SpaceX Starlink, touted by CEO Elon Musk as a means of getting more people online.
Brazilian Communications Minister Fabio Faria met with the billionaire tech mogul in Austin, Texas. SpaceX would send its satellite internet service, Starlink, to rural schools and health institutions.
