THE 2009 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

THE 2009 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS WAS AWARDED TO Charles K. Kao (Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong), and Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith (both of whom worked chiefly at Bell Laboratories, in Murray Hill, NJ, USA) for their work leading to modern telecommunications.  Kao will receive half the prize money for helping to invent modern optical fiber, allowing signals to travel flawlessly thousands of miles.  Boyle and Smith will split the other half of the prize for their development of charge coupled devices (CCDs).

 The part of this year’s award associated with Mr. Kao underscores the fact that optical fibers carry an increasing fraction of phone calls, television programs, and internet traffic into homes.  Data can move down silicon fiber more quickly than through copper wire because nothing is faster than light, and light signaling offers higher bandwidth for electronic circuitry.  Encoding information in the form of light pulses rather than as electric pulses allows more data to flow down a line.  Kao’s principal achievement was in making the fiber more efficient; by excluding impurities in the fiber material, he developed a material that absorbed less of the light carrying signals over long distances.

The part of the prize associated with Boyle and Smith recognizes the huge advantage of capturing images in digital rather than film form.  Pictures can be sent through wires more easily, can be manipulated and processed in creative ways (e.g., you can see a moving comet or supernova in sky scans by subtracting tonight’s pixel map from last night’s map), and can be stored more handily.  Devices such as photomultiplier tubes for converting light into an electric signal have been around for decades.  But the CCD allowed whole two-dimensional fields of optical data to be read out more quickly and efficiently. And, of course, CCD’s have been the backbone of the commercial digital camera industry.