France’s CNET – Centre National d’Etudes des Telecommunications – is claiming the world record for current density through what are essentially two-dimensional lasers – their width being no more than 1.5 nanometres (a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre): in a test carried out by the Centre in France, a current density of 640 amperes per square centimetre was recorded through a material based on phosphorus indium; CNET says the practical application of this performance is expected to be for long-distance optical fibre transmission at speeds of several Gigabits per second over telecommunications networks of the future.
