[Pic: Spiral, OAM data beams]

I don’t really care how fast it is, I just want to own something that uses an infinite-capacity wireless vortex beam. Though it sounds like a death-ray, it describes what American and Israeli researchers have used to create the fastest ever wireless network: twisted beams of light that transfer data at 2,56 terabits per second.

ExtremeTech.com, does a good job of explaining how this works.

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. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.

What this translates to is 60-odd DVD’s in one second. All of 24 in the blink of an eye, or every episode of The Wire faster than it takes to say, “The Wire“. 

Electrical engineering professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles Alan Willner, said:

We didn’t invent the twisting of light, but we took the concept and ramped it up to a terabit-per-second. You’re able to do things with light that you can’t do with electricity. That’s the beauty of light; it’s a bunch of photons that can be manipulated in many different ways at very high speed.

Most data traffic in optical fibres around the world are made up of different data streams on slightly different colours of light, which are split into their constituent colours at the receiving end in a technique called multiplexing. To fully realise OAM’s potential, similar multiplexing of different “twists” must be developed.

Initial experiments were only carried out over a distance of about a metre, and Prof. Willner said that challenges remained for adapting the approach to fibres or for longer-distance transfer. “One of the challenges in this respect is turbulence in the atmosphere,” he explained to the BBC. “For situations that require high capacity… over relatively short distances of less than 1km, this approach could be appealing. Of course, there are also opportunities for long-distance satellite-to-satellite communications in space, where turbulence is not an issue.”

There still needs to be software and hardware developed to make use of this breakthrough, so don’t expect 2,5 T/sec download speeds just yet.

Source: BBC, ExtremeTech.com]