People often ask us about what we do and it’s always been difficult to do that because once we start talking about how we test the reliability of laser devices for the photonics industry – they look at us blankly because not many people really understand how important Photonics is and how big a role it actually plays in our lives.
So we have written this article as a way of describing Photonics in a way that’s easy to understand and hopefully help people to appreciate its importance. Here are 10 absolutely mind-blowing facts about Photonics.
1) Nothing is faster than light. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s.
2) Photonics is the generation, transmission and utilization of light and other electromagnetic radiation.
3) An optical fiber cable is 10um, which is 100 times smaller than the wire in a paper clip!
4) It takes light 1 second to travel 200,000km – that’s 5 times around the earth in an optical fiber cable!
5) Lasers are the bedrock of many Photonics applications – there are 4 main types of lasers; Diode, Fiber, Disk and Gas.
6) A laser can transmit 1.8 gigabytes of data per second which is equivalent to 5000 songs per second!
7) A reliable laser can last up to 15 years without any need for maintenance.
8) By 2020 the worldwide photonics market will be worth over $600bn.
9) There were approximately 2.32 million jobs in Photonics in 2015
10) Facebook has over 1.44 billion monthly active users. Those users send an average of 31.25 million messages and view 2.77 million videos every minute. It would not be possible without the laser to carry all this data.
To summarize -without Photonics and without lasers, there would be no way that Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, Amazon or Snapchat would be able to work. Yelo play an important role in keeping the world connected by ensuring that the lasers used to carry all this data work reliably 24/7.