Ep. 25, Page 17

smbhax on March 9, 2015

'Twisted light' beamed across Vienna (BBC) is an article from last November about an experiment in which scientists successfully transmitted information 3 km through the air on a beam of “twisted” light: by shining a green laser through a special LCD display, they were able to impart specific spiral orbits to its photons, and these photons, with their “superposition of two angular momentums, which go in opposite directions,” were able to have their particular configuration decoded after striking the target detector across town. The reason why this is a potentially very useful proof of concept is that by applying different degrees of “twist” to its photons, each “twist” becomes a separate “channel” of information in the beam, so you can pack far more information into light transmitted in this fashion than you can with standard optical relays.