Science News
“Researchers are using twisting light to enable high-capacity data transmission”
Date : 04-Feb-2019
Researchers created tiny gears that generate a vortex of twisted light. One square millimeter of a computer chip could hold 250,000 of these gears, which could be used to boost the amount of data transmitted with chip-based optical computing and communication.
Image Credit: Abdelrahman Al-Attili, from the University of Southampton
For the first time, researchers have used tiny gears made of germanium to generate a vortex of twisted light that turns around its axis of travel much like a corkscrew which enable high-capacity data transmission . Germanium (Ge) is compatible with the silicon used to make computer chips, the new light source able to boost the amount of data that can be transmitted with chip-based optical computing and communication. Researchers from the following university,University of Southampton in the U.K and University of Tokyo, Toyohashi University of Technology and Hitachi Ltd., all in Japan, has come upon with the new light-emitting gears in the Optical Society (OSA) journal.
Now people are focusing with great interest in generating light that is twisted (technically has orbital angular momentum because of its advantages for communication and computing. By varying numbers of photons emitted or switching between lights two polarization states light is used to carry information. Now when the light is twisted ,each twist can signified a different value or letter, allowing the encoding of more information using less light.
Reference: Abdelrahman Z. Al-Attili, Daniel Burt, Zuo Li, Naoki Higashitarumizu, Frederic Y. Gardes, Katsuya Oda, Yasuhiko Ishikawa, Shinichi Saito. Germanium vertically light-emitting micro-gears generating orbital angular momentum. Optics Express, 2018; 26 (26): 34675 DOI: 10.1364/OE.26.034675