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Phoenix666 writes:

When you make a phone call or browse the internet, chances are a lot of the communication happens over fiber-optic links transmitting billions of bits every second.

A recent experiment shows it may be possible to "twist" light waves, cram in more information than ever before, and send the signal over a practical distance. In this case, the physicists used twisted laser light to send the message "Hello World" between two islands.

Light waves are used in communications all the time. Radio is a form of light, as are lasers that are common in fiber optics. To get information in and out, one can use the amplitude of the wave (as in AM radio), the wave's frequency (used in FM radio) and even the phase and polarization (used in fiber optics along with the first two).

The fact that one can use just four features, or so-called degrees of freedom, to encode information into a single light wave limits how much can be communicated via a photon. An international team from the University of Vienna wanted to see if they could encode information into another feature, the angular momentum, of a light wave, and send it far enough to be useful—in this case, about 88 miles (142 kilometers) between two observatories in the Canary Islands.

Original Submission