In this article: Optics and your future

 

When we think about optics or photonics, many people intuitively think about some special applications, like projectors, lasers (shows), or maybe TV’s. It turns out, Photonics is part of your life in MULTIPLE ways every day, i.e. in your daily routine. Let me give you an example. Take your cell phone: starting from the inside out, it uses a processor uses smallest electronic elements called transistors which were made by optical lithography. Then of course there is a display, which features a lot of optical parts and components. Then let’s think about what you do with the phone. Well basically communicating or excessing data on the net. Those data get in and out of your handheld via RF signals which light is just a part of. But there is more, the entire backbone of todays’ internet is based on photonics, or fiber optics; here 100,000 billion bits of information float down a fiber every second – sounds a lot? Is a lot! Lastly, your nice an detailed handheld case is likely to be machined with the use of lasers as well. In short in every aspect of live optics is becoming more and more important. 

"The Future of modern IT technologies lies in Photonics"

Such potential of photonics has been recently recognized in a report entitled “ Optics & Photonics: Essential Technologies for Our Nation” released by the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) in Washington DC. In their keynote speeches Steven Chu, the U.S Secretary of Energy, and Craig Barrett, Founder and CEO of Intel, addressed the importance and potential of optics and photonics technologies to drive economic growth, create jobs, and enabling future innovations to advance society as a whole.

For instance, Chu highlighted solar cell technologies, which are coming down in price per watt electricity they produce. A long-time target was to get to 1$/W for solar cells, which we have already surpassed (current values are 0.86$/W). However, there is much more potential for solar cell deployment for sustainable energy sources. For example in the so called E2 conference held in November 11-14 in the Netherlands organized by the Optical Society of America (OSA), researchers and industrial leaders come together to discuss new device breakthroughts and system installation methods that make solar cells truly a mass product. Imagine, the efficiency of current solar cells to double, and with the trend of rising electricity costs, a pay-back time of your solar system of less than one year – after which there is an opportunity to actually make a profit using your system?

In the next posts we will be discussing interesting details about solar cells and optical breakthroughts of the.