Solitons for our communications

The tremendous development of digital technology requires increasingly high transmission rates. Guy Millot (CNRS silver medal in 2004) and his team initiated research on fiber optic telecommunications. These transmissions are made possible by solitons, ultra-short light pulses lasting one picosecond. In 2003, the team set a record with a propagation over approximately 1000 km at a rate of 160 gigagbits per second. Such a rate allows the transmission of 2.5 billion telephone calls or 1600 television channels.