"lossless" optical waveguide - loss floor in glass media

[coderman]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, September 8, 2019 9:27 PM, jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:
...

> In order to evaluate this as a proposed idea, a physicist would consider:
>
> 1.  The loss of manufactured optical waveguides did indeed hit an unexplained 'floor' in the early 1980s, about 0.16 db/kilometers of loss.
> 2.  The manufacturers and users of such fibers have had a very powerful motivation to figure out how to lower their loss to well below 0.16 db/kilometers, for nearly 40 years.
> 3.   Nothing has yet been found, or it would have been employed.
> 4.   Photons do indeed possess an oscillating magnetic field.
> 5.   A nucleus of an isotope with 'spin' does indeed behave as magnetic dipole.
> 6.   Such a nucleus should be mechanically affected by the passage of light.
> 7.   Energy should be transferred from that light to the nucleus, and thus the atom, as the light passes.
> 8.   Removing most or all atoms with an electromagnetic 'spin' should remove this loss mechanism, in proportion to the amount of such isotopes remaining.
>
> Do you have any other ideas as to how that loss is manifested?

i wonder if Rayleigh scattering is sufficient to account for the floor? unfortunately this is quite complicated in glass media; i don't know how to answer the question :/

(e.g. the static shear modulus of glass multiplies the factors involved in determining a scattering coefficient...)

best regards,
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