The record for optical data transmission has long since passed a terabit per second, but the feat generally has required the energy of multiple diode lasers. Scientists at the University of Central Florida have reported similar results using a single GaAs device.

Peter Delfyett, who headed the research, will present it at the annual conference of the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society in Glasgow, UK, this month.

The work is also under peer review pending publication in Photonics Technology Letters.

According to Delfyett, his group transmitted 1 Tb/s over a half kilometer of graded-index multimode fiber using a single GaAs diode laser. The experimental system applied multiwavelength mode-locking to partition the signal into 168 WDM channels, with each channel carrying 6 Gb/s. The reported system could close the speed gap between computers and transmission devices in local area networks.