When you share a video on Facebook, in the background there are huge data centers storing this information and ready to retrieve whenever you, or one of your 1200 Facebook friends, click on it. And what if it’s a funny cat video that goes viral? Graduate student Janelle Shane of the University of California, San Diego’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, says it takes lots of storage and speed and that’s why most of these big data centers are using fiber optics.

"As we are sending higher and higher data rates between your computer, your graphics card or different parts of your computer, we want to try and use those same advantages that we got from fiber optics on a computer chip. So, for sending data not only between computers, but now within computers as well."

Shane specializes in photonics, the study of light, and says as computers get faster and faster, they’re going to want to send that data with light, not electricity.

"We are trying to figure out how to make lasers that are so small that they fit well on these computer chips."