The advantage of such a novel waveguide over more conventional ones is that it can bend light around sharp corners.

ECONOMIST: New-age crystals

Conventional optical fibres (the most common form of waveguide at the moment) generally consist of two concentric layers of glass.

ECONOMIST: New-age crystals

Dr Hewish is also scathing: he believes that the Oxford team is simply building a type of conventional radio antenna called a waveguide.

ECONOMIST: Physics

They should improve the filters that, by disentangling the different wavelengths coming out of a waveguide, enable lots of messages to be sent simultaneously.

ECONOMIST: New-age crystals

The gorgeous speaker cabinets are easy on the eyes, with or without the speaker grille, and feature metal matrix waveguide-mounted tweeters that deliver big hi-fi sound from any location in the room.

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Dr Lin is already testing a waveguide designed to steer light with a wavelength of 1.5 microns, and he is also working on three-dimensional waveguides made of silicon, which will provide almost total control over the path the light takes, and make really complex optical circuits possible.

ECONOMIST: New-age crystals

Though there is no reason to use Dr Knight's invention to replace existing optical fibres, it could, by varying the spacing of the air-filled tubes, make a handy filter allowing selected wavelengths (and the messages they carry) to enter or leave the waveguide while the others are contained.

ECONOMIST: New-age crystals

The output is then relayed into a 1.4 mm thick plastic waveguide lens with input and output hologram structures on the surface which squeezes the light down the waveguide and then two dimensionally expands the image back into the user's eye, creating an image that is then mixed into the real world.

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