Directing light from place to the place is the backbone of our modern world. Beneath the oceans and across continents, fiber optic cables carry light that encodes everything from YouTube videos to banking transmissions -- all inside strands about the size of a hair.
"We were utterly surprised by how powerful this super-thin crystal is; not only can it hold energy, but deliver it a thousand times further than anyone has seen in similar systems," said lead study author Jiwoong Park, a professor and chair of chemistry and faculty member of the James Franck Institute and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering."The trapped light also behaved like it is traveling in a 2D space.
"For example, say you had a sample of liquid, and you wanted to sense whether a particular molecule was present," explained Park."You could design it so that this waveguide travels through the sample, and the presence of that molecule would change how the light behaves."