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from the making-it-quicker-to-reach-your-bandwidth-cap dept.
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) researchers announced a Tech breakthrough to allow 100-times-faster internet:
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, published [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06952-1] [DX] in Nature Communications, encodes more data and processes it much faster than conventional fiber optics by using a special form of 'twisted' light.
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."
[...] 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.
In 2016 the same group from RMIT's Laboratory of Artificial-Intelligence Nanophotonics (LAIN) published a disruptive research paper in Science journal describing how they'd managed to decode a small range of this twisted light on a nanophotonic chip. But technology to detect a wide range of OAM light for optical communications was still not viable, until now.
[...] "It fits the scale of existing fiber technology and could be applied to increase the bandwidth, or potentially the processing speed, of that fiber by over 100 times within the next couple of years. This easy scalability and the massive impact it will have on telecommunications is what's so exciting."
Also at The Guardian.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 30 2018, @01:52PM (1 child)
I think they mean circularly polarized
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Osamabobama on Tuesday October 30 2018, @08:41PM
Circular polarization would give you two more modes, left and right. The hyperbolic language suggests that there is more to it than that, though. Maybe it's linearly polarized, but the angle of polarization is swept around the circle at varying frequency. I suppose that would give a channel count of the frequency of the light (the highest channel would be circularly polarized) divided by inter-channel resolution. Each channel would be as capable as the original single mode, but there would need to be some hefty signal processing to separate them on the receiving end, and probably some error checking to compensate for signal overlap.
Disclaimer: I've not read the article.
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