{"id":156460,"date":"2023-01-28T01:25:56","date_gmt":"2023-01-28T07:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/air-waveguide-from-donut-laser-beams"},"modified":"2023-01-28T01:25:56","modified_gmt":"2023-01-28T07:25:56","slug":"air-waveguide-from-donut-laser-beams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/air-waveguide-from-donut-laser-beams","title":{"rendered":"Air Waveguide from \u201cDonut\u201d Laser Beams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/air-waveguide-from-donut-laser-beams2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A waveguide sculpted in air with lasers transmits light over a distance of nearly 50 meters, which is 60 times farther than previous air-waveguide schemes.<\/p>\n<p>Conventional optical waveguides such as optical fibers and planar waveguides consist of a core surrounded by a cladding with a lower index of refraction. Light is efficiently confined in the core by total internal reflection at the core-cladding boundary. Optical fibers can transport light over 100s of kilometers, but there are applications\u2014such as high-power transmission and atmospheric monitoring\u2014where the use of fibers becomes impractical. Sending light directly through air is not an option, as diffraction effects cause the beam to spread out. A potential solution is to \u201csculpt\u201d waveguides in the air with laser pulses that produce a low-density cladding around a central core of unperturbed air. Using a new method with donut-shaped beams, Andrew Goffin from the University of Maryland, College Park, and colleagues have created a 45-m-long waveguide in air [1], reaching 60 times farther than the record they previously established for an air waveguide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A waveguide sculpted in air with lasers transmits light over a distance of nearly 50 meters, which is 60 times farther than previous air-waveguide schemes. Conventional optical waveguides such as optical fibers and planar waveguides consist of a core surrounded by a cladding with a lower index of refraction. Light is efficiently confined in the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}