Space Division Multiplexing in Optical Fibres

Optical communications technology has made enormous and steady progress for several decades, providing the key resource in our increasingly information-driven society and economy. Much of this progress has been in finding innovative ways to increase the data carrying capacity of a single optical fibre. In this search, researchers have explored (and close to maximally exploited) every available degree of freedom, and even commercial systems now utilize multiplexing in time, wavelength, polarization, and phase to speed more information through the fibre infrastructure. Conspicuously, one potentially enormous source of improvement has however been left untapped in these systems: fibres can easily support hundreds of spatial modes, but today's commercial systems (single-mode or multi-mode) make no attempt to use these as parallel channels for independent signals.Comment: to appear in Nature Photonic

Poemathics

Mathematics is a discipline much feared by most students in schools. Handing out strategies to demystify this discipline through interdisciplinarity, that is, to show how mathematics can be used in other branches of knowledge is our goal. Thinking about this issue, we developed the POEMATHICS Project as an alternative activity for the teaching of mathematics allied to the Portuguese language teaching. This initiative consists of relating the mathematics with the written language. Students should develop poems, poetry, texts, stories, music, etc., using mathematical terms and ideas. To promote this activity is necessary the participation of teachers of a language (this work deals with English examples and a workshop done in Portuguese) and Mathematics so that students can be accompanied and together awaken the pleasure of learning as well as improving math and linguistic skills140655665Proceedings of the 4th Brazilian Technology Symposium (BTSym'18)2018Playful games Mathematical education STEM education Cognition Multiple intelligence types Semantics Semiotics Neurolinguistic