About the session
When the laser was invented in 1960 it offered a coherent EM source at a carrier frequency of 432 THz and was immediately seen as the basis for future THz communication systems! Yet it is only now, forty years on, that we see this vision has largely come true. Along the way, there have been many interesting developments and massive problems to solve as well as deviations from the straight development path and some journeys down absolute dead-end paths. This presentation explores this history with the benefit of hindsight and attempts to draw some conclusions for the future. Where will optical communications go next and, perhaps more importantly, where will it most likely not, and how fast is the technology really moving?
