ARE THERE OPTICAL FIBERS THAT CAN FEEL?

By now, you’re probably well aware of just how amazing fiber optic cables are. They’re capable of transmitting data at an incredibly fast rate of speed through the use of light and don’t need to rely on electricity to work. It’s why more and more cities and towns are turning to fiber optic cables when setting up high-speed networks.

 

However, believe it or not, fiber optic cables could be getting even better in the not-too-distant future, as scientists have come up with a way to design fiber optic cables that will be able to sense their surroundings. Essentially, these cables will be capable of figuring out whether they have a solid or a liquid surrounding them, which could help to detect water leaks and other changes in the area around a fiber optic cable.

 

So, how does it work? Well, the scientists who created these newfangled fiber optic cables figured out a way to use the intensity, phase, polarization, and wavelengths of the light inside their cables to detect changes taking place around them. The scientists bounced sound waves around inside of these cables to see how they reacted to changes that were taking place outside of their walls, and they discovered that the sound waves created echoes that left imprints on the light inside of the fiber optic cables indicating what was happening around them at any given moment. Most importantly, they did all this without disturbing the light from doing its job in the cable.

 

The hope is that all of this could make fiber optic cables even more useful than they already are. If fiber optic cables can truly “feel” the solids and liquids around them, it would give them yet another advantage over other types of cable.