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In today's era of information explosion, more and more information is generated and received by human beings, so the demand for communication capacity is also growing rapidly. So, how to use the limited spectrum, space, energy consumption, cost and other resources to adapt to the rapid growth of communication capacity?

At present, the Internet mainly uses light wave as information carrier and optical fiber as transmission medium. The amplitude, phase, polarization, wavelength and time dimension of light wave have been widely used to improve the optical communication capacity.

The latest cutting-edge optical technology: expected to greatly improve the Internet speed!

In addition to these traditional multiplexing techniques, scientists have focused on the vector characteristics of light waves: orbital angular momentum (OAM). Orbital angular momentum beams can be multiplexed as carriers to improve the communication capacity and spectral efficiency of the system. At present, the research in this field has attracted extensive attention.

The latest cutting-edge optical technology: expected to greatly improve the Internet speed!

(source: Wikipedia)

Here, by the way, I would like to review a case introduced before, so that we can have a reference and comparison. This case is not the orbital angular momentum of light waves, but the orbital angular momentum of sound waves, which is similar to that of light waves. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of energy use acoustic orbital angular momentum to package more channels on a single frequency, significantly increasing the amount of information transmission and realizing high-speed underwater acoustic communication.

The latest cutting-edge optical technology: expected to greatly improve the Internet speed!

(source: Chengzhi Shi / Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley)

innovate

Today, I would like to introduce a breakthrough technology, which uses the orbital angular momentum of light waves to improve the speed of information transmission, and is expected to increase the speed of the Internet 100 times.

In a paper published in the journal Nature communications, researchers at the Academy of Sciences at the Royal Melbourne Polytechnic University in Australia have unveiled the world's first nanophoton device that uses vortex light to encode more data and process them faster.

The latest cutting-edge optical technology: expected to greatly improve the Internet speed!

(source: RMIT)

One of the co authors, Dr. Haoran Ren of the Academy of Sciences at the Royal Melbourne Polytechnic University in Australia, said the micro nano photon device they built to read vortex light was the missing key to unlock ultra-high-speed, ultra wideband communications.

technology

Broadband fiber optics (BFO) carries information in the form of optical pulses through optical fibers, and the speed of information transmission can reach the speed of light. However, the way in which light is encoded at one end of the fiber, and how it is processed at the other end, affects data speed.

"Today, optical communications are moving towards a 'capacity crisis' and cannot meet the growing demand for big data," said Dr. Haoran Ren

"We've come up with a way to dramatically increase bandwidth and deliver data accurately with the highest capacity through light."

At present, the most advanced optical fiber communication technologies, like those used in Australia's national broadband network (NbN), carry data on the chromatogram, using only a fraction of the actual capacity of light.

New broadband technologies are being developed that encode data in the shape of oscillations or light waves, and use invisible light to increase bandwidth.

This latest technology at the cutting edge of optical communication technology uses vortex light to carry data, further increasing capacity. This light is also known as the light in the orbital angular momentum (OAM) state.

In 2016, the same team from the artificial intelligence nanooptics Laboratory (lain), Royal Melbourne Polytechnic University, Australia, published a revolutionary research paper in the journal Science, which described how they decoded a small range of vortex light on nano photonic chips. However, this technology shows that it is not feasible for optical communication systems to detect a wide range of OAM light, which is still the case today.

"Our small OAM nanoelectronic detector can separate different OAM light states in a continuous sequence and decode the information carried by the vortex light," Ren said

"Previously, it required a machine the size of a table, which was totally impractical for a telecommunications system. By using ultra-thin topological nanosheets of a fraction of a millimeter, our inventions do this better and are suitable for use at one end of a fiber. "

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Professor Min Gu, director of lain and vice president of research, innovation and entrepreneurship at RMIT, said that the materials used in the equipment could be compatible with silicon-based materials used in most technologies, which could easily be extended to industrial applications.

"Our OAM nano electronic decoder is a bit like an 'eye', it can 'see' the information carried by vortex light and decode it so that it can be understood by electronic devices," he said. The high performance, low cost and small size of this technology make it suitable for the next generation broadband optical communication. "

"It is suitable for existing optical fiber technology, and can increase the bandwidth, or it is expected to improve the processing speed of optical fiber, and the speed will be increased by more than 100 times in the next few years