WHAT do you get if you give a delicate thread of spider’s silk a glassy coating – and then extract the silk by baking? Yushan Yan reckons you will solve a major problem in photonics: how to make ultra-thin, hollow optical fibres narrow enough to carry light beams around the fastest nanoscale optical circuits. Using this technique, Yan and a team of engineers from the University of California at Riverside say they soon expect to be able to make hollow fibres with cores just 2 nanometres wide – or 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.
In addition to photonics, the…
