New technique to suppress sound waves from disorder to improve optical fiber communication

Energy loss due to scattering from material defects is known to set limits on the performance of nearly all technologies that we employ for communications, timing, and navigation. In micro-mechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers, such as those commonly found in cellphones today, microstructural disorder impacts measurement drift and overall accuracy of the sensor, analogous to how a dirty violin string might impact one's enjoyment of beautiful music. In optical fiber communication systems, scat...