Groundbreaking new technology could allow 100-times-faster internet by harnessing twisted light beams

Speed Weed · October 25, 2018

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-groundbreaking-technology-times-faster-internet-harnessing.html

Groundbreaking new technology could allow 100-times-faster internet by harnessing twisted light beams

Broadband fiber-optics carry information on pulses of light, at the speed of light, through optical fibers. But the way the light is encoded at one end and processed at the other affects data speeds.

This world-first nanophotonic device, just unveiled in Nature Communications, encodes more data and processes it much faster than conventional fiber optics by using a special form of 'twisted' light.

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The miniature OAM nano-electronic detector decodes twisted light. Credit: RMIT Uinversity

Dr. Haoran Ren from RMIT's School of Science, who was co-lead author of the paper, said the tiny nanophotonic device they have built for reading twisted light is the missing key required to unlock super-fast, ultra-broadband communications.

"Present-day optical communications are heading towards a 'capacity crunch' as they fail to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of Big Data," Ren said.

"What we've managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth."

Current state-of-the-art fiber-optic communications, like those used in Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), use only a fraction of light's actual capacity by carrying data on the colour spectrum.

New broadband technologies under development use the oscillation, or shape, of light waves to encode data, increasing bandwidth by also making use of the light we cannot see.

This latest technology, at the cutting edge of optical communications, carries data on light waves that have been twisted into a spiral to increase their capacity further still. This is known as light in a state of orbital angular momentum, or OAM.

I wonder if the price is going to be cheap or hella expensive when this technology spread wild. It is interesting to learn that we can get 100 times faster internet by harnessing twisted light beams. I know nothing crap when it comes to the these stuff, but it is interesting to learn it.