Suppose you want to share a movie between two devices, now let’s say that the movie is in Blu-ray format, to make matters worse we have seven of these movies, and we have only wireless connectivity. Surely they are thinking that this would take a few months right? Scientists from the University of Tel Aviv, along with their peers from the University of California and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed to create a wireless connection with a capacity that could transmit all seven movies in a second.
Yes, you read well, but I will repeat it just in case, “a second”.
The new technology based on “twisting light beams” actually takes a while between us. The first publications explaining the “optical vortex” were discussed in the mid-70s.
In essence, you take a ray of light and screw it around its own axis.
The fact of “twisting” the beam causes the light waves on the axis to cancel each other.
On a flat surface, the result is a ring of light with a dark region in the center: This is an optical vortex. By being able to specify the number of turns and their direction, scientists and engineers have considered different ways to take advantage of optical vortices, especially when transmitting data.
Recently, researchers from these three renowned institutions have not only achieved it, but have done so with impressive speed.
The new transmission technique was tested between two points at a distance of one meter and with high-tech equipment, which implies that for the moment, we will have to wait until we can maintain a sufficient level of signal amplification to transmit at more distances. broad and through hardware with the ability to generate this hyper-fast signal at affordable costs to the market.
In the case of technologies such as conventional Wi-Fi and LTE, the spin angular momentum of radio waves is modulated.
However, electromagnetic waves can have both spin angular momentum (SAM) and orbital angular momentum (OAM).
The most recurrent analogy to visualize the difference between both moments is based on the fact that the SAM would be the Earth rotating on its own axis, while the Earth revolving around the Sun would represent the OAM.
The addition of orbital angular momentum to radio signals had been a theory until last March, when the Swedish Space Physics Institute managed to transmit two signals on the same frequency and at the same time in the form of a vortex, through more than 400 meters .
In this opportunity, the researchers managed to “twist” eight jets of light, divided into two groups of four, with a capacity of 300 gigabits per second per jet. The distance traveled by the ray was barely one meter, but the final result yields a transfer of 2.5 terabits per second, probably the fastest wireless transmission ever made.
To put it in perspective, that’s more than 8,000 times faster than Verizon’s fastest Internet connection at home known as FiOS, which has 300 Mbps.
These results, although they do not offer us a technology that is applicable tomorrow, put us face to a future where the bandwidth stops being a limitation, and therefore, technologies and applications that today seem to us science fiction can be implemented and massified.