What’s hollow core fibre.
Comment on They Need To Stop Doing This
sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 11 months agoFor the low price of billions and a decade of work they could build out hollow core fiber coast to coast to get the last 1/3 c.
spez@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Its a type of fiber optic cable where the center of the cable is literally hollow. Normal fiber uses a glass core. Light passing through glass also travels about 2/3 the speed of the light since the speed of light is only constant in an empty vacuum. With hollow core, light is no longer passing through glass so its speed is much closer to the actual speed of light.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
… wait, how does that work? Total internal reflection happens at the boundary to a lower index of refraction.
sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I don’t know the physics well enough, but here is some general information.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber
www.rp-photonics.com/hollow_core_fibers.html
High Group Velocity, Low Latency Signal Transmission
The group velocity of guided light is usually close to the vacuum velocity of light. This implies substantially lower latency for signal transmission through hollow-core fibers.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
My dumb person guess is that it needs to be in a perfectly straight line.
There’s probably more to it.
Cort@lemmy.world 11 months ago
How do you get internal reflectance with a hollow core?
AffineConnection@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You can’t have total internal reflection within a hollow core, but that’s not how they function.
affiliate@lemmy.world 11 months ago
that would really help with playing video games