Spin on Light
This was news to me, when I read it in Scientific American -- about a decade ago, it was discovered that one of the properties of light is that it has orbital angular momentum (OAM). But not much has been done with the information since -- astronomer Martin Harwit however, thinks that information can be conveyed using the OAM of light -- and perhaps, astronomers should start making observations of OAM. Not only that, but far advanced life could be using that property of light for communication purposes. Down here on Earth, it's actually quite surprising that the OAM property of light hasn't been exploited yet to stuff more information down the fibre optic tunnels that link computers across distances. Today, information is packed in light using the polarization states of a photon to encode a bit at a time -- but if a photon's OAM can be measured accurately, and efficiently, more information can be packed into a photon, as there is potentially an infinite number of OAM. The more accurate our measurement of OAM, the greater number of bits can be encoded in a photon. And this is cool!
This was news to me, when I read it in Scientific American -- about a decade ago, it was discovered that one of the properties of light is that it has orbital angular momentum (OAM). But not much has been done with the information since -- astronomer Martin Harwit however, thinks that information can be conveyed using the OAM of light -- and perhaps, astronomers should start making observations of OAM. Not only that, but far advanced life could be using that property of light for communication purposes. Down here on Earth, it's actually quite surprising that the OAM property of light hasn't been exploited yet to stuff more information down the fibre optic tunnels that link computers across distances. Today, information is packed in light using the polarization states of a photon to encode a bit at a time -- but if a photon's OAM can be measured accurately, and efficiently, more information can be packed into a photon, as there is potentially an infinite number of OAM. The more accurate our measurement of OAM, the greater number of bits can be encoded in a photon. And this is cool!
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