On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:55:09 -0600, Tom Ring
wrote:


Someone, I think it may have been Richard, once mentioned a form of
distortion that was due, I think, to the modulation itself.

Hi Tom,

In unrelated research for a forum I am doing for the Foreign Policy
Association's Global Decisions, I ran across an article that may bear
on your workmate's discussion.

Reference: "The Ultimate White Light," Robert R. Alfano, Scientific
American, Dec. 2006.

The piece is about "supercontinuum light" that exhibits self-phase
modulation when the fiber is forced into nonlinear behavior with
sufficiently high power densities (hence my sidebar discussion in
another posting). The boon here is that this laser replaces 100
parallel lasers (of differing wavelengths) while maintaining coherence
across its spectrum. This increases the data capacity to transmission
rates of petabits. Even compared to today's gigabits, this is still a
very long way from infinite, however.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC