Chip Makes Twisted Light for Communications

Chip Makes Twisted Light for Ultra High Speed Communications via @IEEESpectrum

Video: Xinlun Cai/Jainwei Wang/Mark G. Thompson/Siuyan Yu With a Twist: Data channels in optical fibers could be encoded using light with orbital angular momentum. A rotating spiral interference pattern is created by disturbing the phase of a reference laser beam relative to that of a beam with a specific orbital angular momentum. 24 October 2012—Researchers in the United Kingdom and China have made a microchip capable of emitting laser beams with a peculiar property known as orbital angular momentum (OAM). Today’s optical-fiber communication systems use different wavelengths of laser light to squeeze multiple channels of data through the same “light pipe” simultaneously, offering much speedier data transfer rates. But taking advantage of photons with orbital—sometimes called “twisted” or “corkscrew”—angular momentum is a less-studied way to encode data channels in light. ...

Full article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/c...