Light Waves Can Now Carry More Data

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. The research demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips.

Study principal investigator Boubacar Kanté, the Chenming Hu Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences explains that the current communication channels will soon not be enough for the continuous and increasing explosion of data we produce and consume.

This new finding forces a revisit to the amount of information that can be ‘multiplexed’, or simultaneously transmitted, by a coherent light source. A common example of multiplexing is the transmission of multiple telephone calls over a single wire, but there had been fundamental limits to the number of coherent twisted light waves that could be directly multiplexed. Now that idea can be revisited.