how do fiber optics work?

Question

how can information be broken to "ride the light" and then assembled back together? when broken does information become a particle or what?

Answer 1

Fiberoptics is a technology that involves transmitting light down a long thin flexible glass fiber. If you take a piece of glass on edge, and you shine a light into it, you'll see the light making all the other edges of the glass light up brightly. However, you won't "see" the light as you look through the glass. This is because the light, traveling along inside the plane of the glass bounces back and forth each time it hits the surface where the glass ends and the air around it begins. Light hitting the surface of glass from the inside at very shallow angles is almost completely bounced back in, hence you don't "see" any light leak out of the face of the glass... just along the edges where the beam hits fairly square.

By use of this principle, long ultrathin fibers can be used to transmit light a long distance with very little loss. The fibers can be bent around curves and they take the light right along with them.

This is useful for data transmission because there are limitations to what you can do with electricity in wires. It turns out that when you send a pulse of electricity down a wire, it creates a magnetic and an electric field. When you want that pulse of electricity to stop, the magnetic and electric fields collapse. While they're collapsing, they exert an electric force which tends to induce a current in the wire. By pulsing the electric current on and off very rapidly, you can actually have the physical effects of the electromagnetic fields mess with the electric signal. None of this happens with light transmission. Fiberoptic cable is capable of a faster data transmission rate without loss of signal fidelity.

In principle, the way it works is just like transmitting data by way of electrical pulses in a wire. Instead, the computer at one end is talking to a device which emits light pulses which are carried down a fiberoptic wire. At the other end, the receiving computer is traslating the light pulses back to electrical ones.

Answer 2

Fiber optics works in the following way:

Fiber: A glass fiber is clad with varying density optic materials so that light passes down the center of the fiber and when the fiber is bent, the light "shifts" away from the clad towards the center. This way, light can be transmitted for miles or even thousands of miles around bends, under water, etc.

Light: The light is typically an infra-red laser diode that is pulsed (turned on and off) millions or billions of times per second and directed into the fiber. The fiber caries the pulsed light to a receiver that converts the light pulses back to an electrical signal. The optical pulses work much the same way a modem works with sound over a phone line or electrical pulses work in a computer LAN (Local Area Network) to transmit and receive messages. The data to be sent (programs, emails, etc.) starts off as data, has information (headers) added to it to form packets and these are transmitted and the receiver strips off the extra data leaving just the original data.

So, a phone call in California is converted to data, information is added, it's converted to light pulses, it is transmitted along fiber optics buried in the ground, travels to New York, is converted back to an electrical signal, has the data extracted, and it's converted to a call on the other end.

Answer 3

Fiber optics works in basically the same fashion as a computer processes information. 0 and 1 , on and off. Data transmission works on the same principle. Only much faster, hence the the term "at the speed of light". You may see a solid stream of light from a "hot" fiber. But what you don't see are the pulses of light in which the light "goes off" , it's just to fast for the human eye to see.

Answer 4

Information is "broken" down into 0's and 1's. Basically your computer works based upon on and off switches. Those on and off switches represent numbers, letters, whatever and can be simplified to on and off flashes of light.

Once you understand binary, this is a lot easier to understand. After all, there are only 10 types of people out there. Those that understand binary and those that don't.

Answer 5

the data is first tramsmitted in to light ray using the LED transmitter so u can have many number of data using the single fibre optic cable (u can have many number of light according to the wavelength) then the light are passed through to the cable and reached the destination where the ray is again transmitted into the LED reciever where it can able to convert the ray into data.... thats it mike.




simple and more power ful

Answer 6

let me add something to our freinds answer

When you use fiber to send information as you know your communication is serial so for security you use start bit, end bit and parity bit.
They help you to find wrong data and information

Answer 7

Have fun reading.