TINY liquid lenses that set solid in a flash of light could slash the cost of making “optical chips”. Scientists at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in New Jersey have developed a technique for solidifying a liquid lens as soon as it is the right shape.
Optical chips fire light around fibre-optic “circuits” to process data. At the moment their components have to be lined up with the optical fibres using a fiddly miniature robot hand called a micromanipulator.
The trouble is that unless the pieces are aligned to within a micrometre, light gets lost at junctions, ruining the signal. So…
