高錕進行甚應實驗找出光纖

In brief, Prof. Charles Kao did experiments to remove impurities in glass to obtain high purity glass material. Such pure glass could be used in glass fibres to convey optical signals to long distance without much attenuation. Thus replace the use of copper wires in telecommunication.

The details are:
In 1965, Kao concluded that in order to use optical fibre in telecommunication, the attentuation of optical signals in the fibre should not exceed 20 dB/km. But fibres at that time were having attenuation as large as 1000 dB/km.

During this period, Kao pointed out that the high purity of fused silica (SiO2) made it an ideal candidate for optical communication. Kao also stated that the impurity of glass material is the main cause for the dramatic decay of light transmission inside glass fiber, rather than fundamental physical effects such as scattering as many physicists thought at that time, and such impurity could be removed.

In 1968, Kao with M.W. Jones measured the intrinsic loss of bulk-fused silica at 4 dB/km, which is the first evidence of ultra-transparent glass.

Kao developed important techniaues and configurations for glass fibre waveguides, and contribute to the development of different fibre types and system devices which met a wide area of applications.

You could refer to the following web-page for details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_K._Kao

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-280511163626302920#

高錕是進行了破璃實驗，因為光纖是需要高純度破璃才能傳送資訊。