As gas prices soar and climate change concerns become more urgent, Americans are increasingly considering electric vehicles. Much of the focus has been directed at electric grid capacity to accommodate future EV charging on a large scale, said Kevin Morgan, chairman of the Fiber Broadband Association and chief marketing officer of Clearfield, who has been looking beyond that short-term worry to the bigger picture of connectivity. His solution, discussed in a new thought piece from Clearfield, is simple: fiber. “Fiber optic line is being laid now,” as part of the deployment of broadband infrastructure funded by the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, Morgan said. “Why not make a path [for fiber] to connect EV charging stations?”

What if you could double the bandwidth of your outside plant fiber optic network easily, or even multiply the bandwidth by 10, 20 or more? In high-speed links, it’s a common practice and accomplished using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).

Using two types of glass with different refractive indexes and that are stacked in a specific arrangement, researchers developed a multimode fiber with a parabolic refractive index that enabled transmission up to the mid-infrared and high nonlinearity. The spectrum of short pulses of light injected into the fiber massively broadened, to span from the visible to mid-infrared. The light beam remained smooth because of self-cleaning dynamics induced by the parabolic refractive index. Such a light source, with and ultrabroad spectrum, smooth beam, and high power, could be used in environmental sensing or high-resolution imaging for medical diagnostics.