ABSTRACT
The International Year of Light and Light-based Technology (IYL 2015) was an important opportunity to celebrate light in all its forms and utilisations. One major area where Light plays a crucial role is optical telecommunications. Light-based technologies that have been developed for optical signal transmission and processing are actually the foundations of any other technologies using Light. The spectacular success of optical telecommunications is primary the result of the boom of the Internet. This development is the fruit of a main effort of research and development in the field of guided optics which led to an improvement in the performances of optical fibres and optoelectronic components able to generate, detect, modulate or commutate light. Consequently, optoelectronic components of any kind at low cost become available in the market, pushing the emergence of other applications in various fields including strategic fields like space and military and also fields of everyday life such as data storage, entertainment, medicine and industry, for instance. In a competing way, the advent of nano-photonics is pushing the limits of photonic devices miniaturisation on scales lower than the wavelength.
