Professor Ben Eggleton - Cosmos Magazine Bright Sparks Award Winner

Age: 36
Job title: Director, Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems
Degrees: BSc (Hons), PhD
Born: Sydney, Australia
Resides: Sydney, Australia

Ben Eggleton’s fascination with optical communications began when he was an undergraduate, using optical telescopes to peer into the early universe. “But rather than getting excited about astronomy, I got excited about the optical fibres that were used in the instruments,” he explains.

It was an apt beginning to a stellar career. Eggleton is now director of the Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), a consortium involving six Australian universities, with 100 researchers. It’s here that he’s working to develop a device that promises to increase the speed of the Internet a thousand-fold.

For most of its journey, data on the Internet hurtles along optical fibres at the speed of light. But every time it hits a router – a device that directs data to its intended destination – it has to be converted from light to electronic signals and back again, a slow and energy consuming process.

To remove these bottlenecks, Eggleton and his colleagues are developing a photonic chip, a thumbnail-sized device that uses light rather than electronic signals – thus cutting out the middle man in routing data.

Optical processing was the subject of Eggleton’s doctorate, which drew international attention and saw the young researcher recruited to the prestigious Bell Laboratories in the USA, an institute with a long history of pioneering in communications.

At the end of 2002, he returned to the University of Sydney and founded CUDOS to develop the photonic chip. Since then, his team has made several crucial breakthroughs.

Last year they made headlines by slowing light to a fraction of its usual speed without changing the wave shape. This is significant because all-optical networks will need to be able to manage the speed of the light pulses without corrupting the information contained therein.

Eggleton predicts the photonic chip will see its first applications within five years. Beyond that, he thinks all-optical networks will revolutionise health, education and defence by offering faster, more energy-efficient communications systems.

Source: Cosmos Magazine Cosmos Website