Communications at the speed of light
More than fifty years have passed since the development of optical fibers by Charles Kao in 1965. Such means of signal transmission represents one of the greatest technological advances that have been carried out in recent years. Optical fibers -which are the thickness of a human hair- are capable of guiding light so that a huge amount of information can be transmitted to very high distances, in addition to offering alternative applications that include, among others, their use in the medical, industrial or decorative fields.
In this talk, different aspects regarding the nature of light as well as the fundamentals of optical fibers will be addressed. This way, with the help of a series of visual demonstrations which will be performed through different gadgets such as laser emitters, flashlights, chromatic discs, holograms, Newton's prisms, transparent fibers, and many others, the underlying science of optical fibers will be reviewed while at the same time contemplating illustrative light-based experiments.
Bio. José-Víctor Rodríguez was born in Murcia, Spain, in 1975. He received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV), Spain, in 2001 ─after doing his graduate thesis at the Lund Institute of Technology, Lund University, Sweden─ and the Ph.D. in Communications Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (UPCT), Spain, in 2006. Moreover, he received the Master’s degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the Valencian International University (VIU) in 2018. In 2002, he joined the Department of Information Technologies and Communications, at the UPCT, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He has been giving lectures on Optical Communications for 18 years at the UPCT and his research interests include the modeling of radio wave propagation, the development of acoustic propagation models, and the obtaining of biomedical algorithms through biosensors.