Three decades of steady increases in fiber-optic transmission capacity have powered the growth of the Internet and information-based technology. But sustaining that growth has required increasingly complex and costly new technology . Now, a new experiment has shown that an elegant bit of laser physics called a frequency comb—which earned Theodor Hänsch and John Hall the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics —could come to the rescue by greatly improving optical transmitters. x A pair of silicon-nitride microresonator frequency combs to transmit 50 terabits of data through 75 kilometers of single-mode fiber using 179 separate carrier wavelengths. They also showed that microresonator frequency combs could serve as local oscillators in receivers, which could improve transmission quality, and lead to petabit-per-second (1000 terabit) data rates inside data centers. The German and Swiss researchers’ transmission scheme is similar to many of today's fiber-optic netwo...