E-Mail IMAGE: When a well-defined image propagates from the right-hand side to the left-hand side through a 1-km-long multimode fiber, its spatial profile and polarization will be strongly distorted. By flipping the... view more Credit: Illustration by Yiyu Zhou The use of multimode optical fibers to boost the information capacity of the Internet is severely hampered by distortions that occur during the transmission of images because of a phenomenon called modal crosstalk. However, University of Rochester researchers at the Institute of Optics have devised a novel technique, described in a paper in Nature Communications, to "flip" the optical wavefront of an image for both polarizations simultaneously, so that it can be transmitted through a multimode fiber without distortion. Researchers at the University of South Florida and at the University of Southern California collaborated on the project.