The dream of a speedy all-optical Internet has so far been thwarted by a vexing bottleneck: optical switches must convert data to an electrical signal to switch data from one optical fiber to the next, then convert the data back to optical to speed it on its way. This conversion requires costly and bulky equipment, and when you scale up to the high-bandwidth data streams demanded by the latest optical networks, these switches are no longer cost-effective. A better solution is an all-optical device that can affordably switch gigabytes of data without skipping a beat.

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