Twisted vortex beams can transmit data wirelessly at 2.5 terabits per second.
American and Israeli researchers have used twisted vortex beams to transmit data wirelessly at 2.5 terabits per second.
2.5 terabits per second is equivalent to 320 gigabytes per second, or around seven full Blu-ray movies per second.
These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream.
In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM.
Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, twisted together eight ~300Gbps visible light data streams using OAM.
Each of the eight beams has a different level of OAM twist. The beams are bundled into two groups of four, which are passed through different polarization filters.
One bundle of four is transmitted as a thin stream, like a screw thread, while the other four are transmitted around the outside, like a sheathe.
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