University of Southern California (USC)-led multi-national team has designed a system to send data at high speed of 2.56 terabits per second by using twisted beams of light.
This system is capable of sending more than 85,000 folds more data per second. The team has worked with scientists from the U.S., Pakistan, Israel and China. This kind of work could be used to develop short free-space terrestrial links and high-speed satellite communication links, or could be utilized in the fiber optic cables, which are in turn used by a few Internet service providers.
Alan Willner, who works as an electrical engineering professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and also the corresponding author of an article about the research which was released in Nature Photonics journal on June 24, stated that work which cannot be done by using electricity can now be done using light. Willner added that photons can be controlled in a number of ways at extreme speed.
The beam-twisting phase holograms were utilized by Willner and his colleagues in order to control eight light beams, wherein each beam twisted into a helical shape, which was similar to DNA, as it is passed through a free space. Each beam can be turned around in a different way and encoded with 0 and 1 data bits, thus developing an independent data stream just like that of separate channels on the radio.
The experiment led to the transmission of data into a free space in a lab, thus simulating the communications that may arise between space satellites. The next step in the research field will be to explore how this experiment could be used in fiber optics just like those used to send data over the Internet.