Kerry Vahala studies the physics of new photonic devices
for communications networks. Long-distance communications is dominated by photonics,
because of the low loss of fiber optic lines. On the other hand, routing and
switching are dominated by electronic transistor circuits. In the future, Vahala
believes that photonics will take over more and more of the routing and switching
functions, because it is messy to convert back and forth between photonic devices
and electronic devices. Vahala’s group is developing extremely efficient
silica micro-resonators for filters, wavelength selectors, and tunable lasers.
