| Groundbreaking new technology could allow 100-times-faster internet by harnessing twisted light beams to carry more data and process it faster. | |
| Broadband fiber-optics carry information on pulses of light, at the speed of light, through optical fibers. But the way the light is encoded at one end and processed at the other affects data speeds. | |
| This world-first nanophotonic device, just unveiled in Nature Communications (“Angular-momentum nanometrology in an ultrathin plasmonic topological insulator film”), encodes more data and processes it much faster than conventional fiber optics by using a special form of ‘twisted’ light. |
| Dr Haoran Ren from RMIT’s School of Science, who was co-lead author of the paper, said the tiny nanophotonic device they have built for reading twisted light is the missing key required to unlock super-fast, ultra-broadband communications. | |
| “Present-day optical communications are heading towards a ‘capacity crunch’ as they fail to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of Big Data,” Ren said. | |
| “What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth.” | |
| Current state-of-the-art fiber-optic communications, like those used in Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN), use only a fraction of light’s actual capacity by carrying data on the colour spectrum. | |
| New broadband technologies under development use the oscillation, or shape, of light waves to encode data, increasing bandwidth by also making use of the light we cannot see. | |
| This latest technology, at the cutting edge of optical communications, carries data on light waves that have been twisted into a spiral to increase their capacity further still. This is known as light in a state of orbital angular momentum, or OAM. | |
| In 2016 the same group from RMIT’s Laboratory of Artificial-Intelligence Nanophotonics (LAIN) published a disruptive research paper in Science journal describing how they’d managed to decode a small range of this twisted light on a nanophotonic chip. But technology to detect a wide range of OAM light for optical communications was still not viable, until now. | |
| “Our miniature OAM nano-electronic detector is designed to separate different OAM light states in a continuous order and to decode the information carried by twisted light,” Ren said. | |
| “To do this previously would require a machine the size of a table, which is completely impractical for telecommunications. By using ultrathin topological nanosheets measuring a fraction of a millimeter, our invention does this job better and fits on the end of an optical fiber.” |
Image Credit: RMIT University
News This Week
Video: Amplifying the impact of scientific innovations
From Frontiers Forum: How can research translate to R&D? Or a whole new business venture? In a panel session at Science Unlimited 2019, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group CEO Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Life Biosciences CEO [...]
Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked
More and more security holes are appearing in cryptocurrency and smart contract platforms, and some are fundamental to the way they were built. Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange [...]
Supercapacitor nano-architecture: designing a plant-powered future
“The most crucial result of this work is the correlation between form and function in supercapacitor materials,” states first author Dina Ibrahim Abouelamaiem. She elaborates that “our research is driven by the need for [...]
Updated – Worldwide Press for “Human Brain/Cloud Interface”
“We’ll have nanobots that… connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. Our thinking will be a…. biological and non-biological hybrid.” Ray Kurzweil, TED 2014 UPDATE - June 18 2019 Since [...]
Research reveals liquid gold on the nanoscale
Swansea University researchers have discovered what liquid gold looks like on the nanoscale – and in doing so have mapped the way in which nanoparticles melt, which is relevant to the manufacturing and performance [...]
The Potential for Nanomedicine to Clean up our Bodies
A new study by the Environmental Working Group reveals that: “Major food companies like General Mills continue to sell popular children’s breakfast cereals and other foods contaminated with troubling levels of glyphosate, the cancer-causing [...]
Nanotechnology treatment reverses multiple sclerosis in mice
A nanotechnology treatment derived from bone marrow stem cells has reversed multiple sclerosis symptoms in mice and could eventually be used to help humans, according to a new study led by University of California, [...]
Scientists create new class of two-dimensional materials
In a paper published this week in Nature ("Freestanding crystalline oxide perovskites down to the monolayer limit"), materials science researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions unveil a new process for [...]
Understanding the (ultra-small) structure of silicon nanocrystals
New research provides insight into the structure of silicon nanocrystals, a substance that promises to provide efficient lithium ion batteries that power your phone to medical imaging on the nanoscale. The research was conducted [...]
Small particles can have big consequences for electronics in space missions
Several space missions, planned by both the European Space Agency and NASA, have their target set on Jupiter and its moons. The extraordinarily harsh radiation environments in the Jovian system will set some strict [...]
Video – What is Neuralink? Neural Lace Explained
The text of the video commentary: Elon Musk’s new project Neuralink has been making headlines recently, but very little is known about this mysterious company so far. We’re going to answer [...]
‘I wash all my food like crazy’ Scientists voice concern about nanoparticles
rance is clamping down on a common food additive that has been shown to be carcinogenic in animal studies. The ban of titanium dioxide, announced by the French government last month, follows a review [...]
Cyber defense for nanoelectronics
Today’s societies critically depend on electronic systems. Past spectacular cyber-attacks have clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of existing systems and the need to prevent such attacks in the future. The majority of available cyber-defenses concentrate [...]
Researchers discover how a nanocatalyst works at the atomic level
Researchers of the Nanoscience Center (NSC) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and in the Xiamen University, China, have discovered how copper particles at the nanometre scale operate in modifying a carbon–oxygen bond when [...]
Scientists discover signalling circuit boards inside body’s cells
Cells in the body are wired like computer chips to direct signals that instruct how they function, research suggests (Nature Communications, “The cell-wide web coordinates cellular processes by directing site-specific Ca2+ flux across cytoplasmic [...]
Nanotechnology vs. cancer – How tiny particles sniff out the deadly disease
We may be able to detect cancer soon by simply peeing on a stick. - Cancer is an aberrant function of a normal cell, where the regulators of that cell's dividing are broken [...]
Leave A Comment