Hollow core fibers replace conventional glass cores with gas or vacuum to enable unique properties including faster speed of light and reduced sensitivity to environmental variations.

The new technology, being advanced at the renowned Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the Zepler Institute, is believed to achieve lower loss and higher data transmission capacity than solid glass fibers, with ongoing research accelerating models toward this maximum performance.
 
The new hollow-core fibers attenuate light traveling through them by 50% less than the previous record, reported just six months ago. The maximum transmission length over which data can be transmitted in such revolutionary fibers has also doubled.
 
Thanks to an innovative design proposed at the ORC, in just 18 months, the attenuation in hollow-core data-transmitting fibers has been reduced by a factor of 10, from 3.5 dB/km to only 0.28 dB/km—within a factor of two of the attenuation of conventional glass fiber technology. At the same time, the maximum transmission distance over which high-bandwidth data streams can be transmitted through an air core has been improved by more than 10 times, from 75 to 750 km.
 
Professor Francesco Poletti, head of the hollow-core fiber group at ORC, says: “Transmitting light in an air core instead of a glass core offers many advantages that could revolutionize optical communications as we know them. These latest results further reduce the performance gap between hollow-core fiber and common optical fiber technology, and the whole team is really excited about the prospect of further significant improvements that seem possible.
 
Latency, which is the round-trip time for communications, is becoming as important as bandwidth for the new digital economy. Network latency creates a delay between detection and response, causing problems for AR/VR users, loss of fidelity in remote surgery, and crashes in autonomous systems. These fibers offer a vital 30% reduction in round-trip data transmission times and could enable the next generation of real-time connected digital applications, from smart manufacturing and advanced healthcare to entertainment.”
 
The considerable improvements in attenuation and transmission distance demonstrated in these two studies open the possibility of achieving greater distances, approaching 1000 km, in typical long-distance terrestrial data links.
 
Researchers in Southampton are pushing the limits of hollow-core performance in several major research programs, including the European Research Council-funded LightPipe and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)-funded Airguide Photonics.
 
The team is working closely with one of the leading groups in advanced optical communications at the Politecnico di Torino, led by Professor Pierluigi Poggiolini, and the ORC spinout Lumenisity.