Networks of optical fibers speed massive amounts of data around the world, enabling the Internet and changing the very nature of communications. Now engineers and physicists are seeking ways to adapt optical systems to move data from point to point inside computers. If these so-called optical interconnects are successfully developed, they could allow computers to share more information among their components more quickly; without them, the continuous increases in computing speed and power that we now take for granted could abruptly level off.

Data in computers currently move across chips and from chip to chip electronically, through tiny metal wires. But as computers get faster and faster, manipulating ever more data, these wires are just not up to the task: it's a bit like connecting to the Internet over the phone instead of a broadband link. Moving data to a computer's central processor from its memory, for example, is already a notorious bottleneck; the wires simply can't ship data from memory fast enough to keep the processor busy. And the problem is only going to get worse.