Curious about how difficult would be to splice it.

Not a comment on the article, but the linked URL makes me vaguely uncomfortable.

Hollow-core optical fibers may have a bright future [1], along with another HN thread from 8 years ago [2], I have longed for these cables where we could cut Japan to New York latency by 50ms.

Unfortunately we dont seems to be anywhere close to it.

[1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/fiber-optics/article/1417001...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16194973

I was going to do the "well akshually..." about HCFs because this article is so light on details. I used to work in a related field many years ago, and the attenuation of these fibers relegated them to niche applications (short-lengths that needed the odd properties of a hollow core, like ultra-high power transmission, low dispersion, low nonlinearity, etc.) They were orders of magnitude too lossy for long-haul telecommunications applications at the time.

But a quick search proved my knowledge was not up to date - here is the paper linked from the Laser Focus World blurb someone linked above. Looks like HCFs have achieved loss parity with traditional single-mode fused silica fibers, at least in the lab. Pretty amazing and cool if you ask me!

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/470034/1/OFC2022_PD_Jasion_submi...

This is fascinating. As an engineer, my mind always goes to: "what are the practical challenges":

* How do you splice without crushing the core?

* How do you terminate/splice and maintain vacuum?

* How do you terminate at all

The article is full of AI slop, sorry.

How do you evacuate these fibers to any decent vacuum?

Sticking a vacuum pump on one end and waiting presumably won't work because gas will take a really really long time to diffuse along a multi kilometer long micrometer wide tube...