"You're able to do things with light that you can’t do with electricity", said Alan Willner, electrical engineering professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the corresponding author of an article about the research that was published in Nature Photonics on June 24. “That’s the beauty of light; it’s a bunch of photons that can be manipulated in many different ways at very high speed.”


Willner and his colleagues used beam-twisting “phase holograms” to manipulate eight beams of light so that each one twisted in a DNA-like helical shape as it propagated in free space. Each of the beams had its own individual twist and can be encoded with “1” and “0” data bits, making each an independent data stream — much like separate channels on your radio.


Their demonstration transmitted the data over open space in a lab, attempting to simulate the sort of communications that might occur between satellites in space.


Among the next steps for the research field will be to advance how it could be adapted for use in fiber optics, like those frequently used to transmit data over the Internet.


The team's work builds on research done by Leslie Allen, Anton Zeilinger, Miles Padgett and their colleagues at several European universities.


"We didn't invent the twisting of light, but we took the concept and ramped it up to a terabit-per-second", Willner said. His team included Jian Wang, Jeng-Yuan Yang, Irfan Fazal, Nisar Ahmed, Yan Yan, Hao Huang, Yongxiong Ren and Yang Yue from USC; Samuel Dolinar from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Moshe Tur from Tel Aviv University.


Wang, the lead author, left USC after completing the research and is now a professor at the Huazhong University of Science & Technology in China.


This research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the Information in a Photon program.





Source 
University of Southern California News


A USC-led team demonstrated that beams of light can be twisted and combined to transmit data at dramatically increased speeds. (Photo/Sjoerd van der Wal)

Scientists Twist Light to Send Data