Fiber optics has not yet even become widespread for home use and already, scientists have come up with something potentially better. Unfortunately, the technology isn’t developed well enough for it to replace what’s currently out there, anytime soon.

This new laser technology actually works opposite from the way that most traditional lasers work. Instead of shooting beams of light, it shoots beams of “night” or darkness. The new laser, which creates “dark pulses,” was created by scientists at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology and JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado.

The logic behind the new technology is that light degrades and fades over great distances. In fiber optics, light even bleeds together. This creates noise and errors that could be avoided using dark pulses instead.

The lasers being used for fiber optics today are ones that pulse, oscillating between and on and off stage. Though the light never really turns off, its intensity is greatly reduced by around 70 percent during the “off” stage. In other words, the pulse laser works with low light intensities, with the occasional brilliant pulses of high intensity light.

The new laser works exactly opposite of light pulse lasers with occasional bursts of dark pulses. These dark pulses last for only about a nanosecond each. Dark pulses don’t fade, degrade or bleed nearly as much as traditional light pulses do, and this causes less noise and fewer errors. The dark pulses have also been found to transmit signals faster and with less noise than light pulses through certain fiber optic cables.

However, developers and investors in fiber optic technology are not likely going to abandon the extensive research, infrastructure and development that are already in place for traditional laser optics. The world will have to wait a little longer to take advantage of this technology.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Technology.