Power/Performance Bits: April 20
Multiplexing twisted light; flexible body heat harvesting; carbon quantum dots.
Multiplexing twisted light
Researchers from University of California San Diego and University of California Berkeley found a way to multiplex light by using discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings.
“It’s the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed,” said Boubacar Kanté, an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. “We’ve been experiencing an explosion of data in our world, and the communication channels we have now will soon be insufficient for what we need. The technology we are reporting overcomes current data capacity limits through a characteristic of light called the orbital angular momentum. It is a game-changer with applications in biological imaging, quantum cryptography, high-capacity communications and sensors.”