A new optical-based communication tool can transmit data in a fast, cyclic motion like a vortex flow.
This optical advance, described in a recent study in Science, could become a central part of the next generation of computers to address the growing need for human information sharing in the world.
It may also eliminate concerns about the failure of Moore's Law - Moore's law says researchers will find new ways to continually make computers smaller, faster, and cheaper.
"In order to use less energy to transmit more data, we need to reconsider the internal mechanisms of these machines," said Dr. Liang Feng, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Buffalo.
Close-up images of a swirling laser beam
Another co-author of the article is Natalia M., an electrical engineering professor at the University of Buffalo. Dr. Litchinitser.
Additional authors include Pei Miao and Zhifeng Zhang, doctoral students at the University of Buffalo; Jingbo Sun, Ph.D., an electrical engineering associate at the University of Buffalo; Dr. Wiktor Walasik, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Buffalo; and the University of Buffalo, currently in Italy Professor Stefano Longhi, Professor, Politecnico di Milano.
For decades, researchers have been able to integrate more components than ever before into silicon-based computer chips. Their success explains why today's smartphones have higher computing power than the most powerful computers in the world in the 1980s, and the cost of those supercomputers at that time would be in the millions of dollars converted to today's currency Giant, and its size and large file cabinet almost.
However, researchers are facing a bottleneck that the existing technologies can no longer meet the needs of the society for data. While projections vary from one party to another, many believe this is likely to happen in the next five years.
Researchers are tackling this problem in many ways, including optical communication technologies that use light to transmit information. There are a lot of examples of optical communications, from ancient beacons to modern fiber optic cables used for watching television and surfing the Internet.
Lasers are the heart of today's optical communications systems. Researchers have manipulated lasers in various ways, the most common way to bring different signals together in a single line to carry more information. But these technologies - especially wavelength division multiplexing and time division multiplexing - have reached their limits.
The team, led by the University of Buffalo, used another light manipulation technique known as orbital angular momentum to advance the advancement of lasers, which place lasers in a central swirling spiral pattern.
Often, such lasers are too large for use on today's computers, but the team led by the University of Buffalo has succeeded in reducing the size of the vortex lasers to about the size of a computer chip. Since the laser beam propagates along a spiral pattern, the information is encoded into a different vortex curve, so it can carry ten times more information than a linear laser.
Vortex lasers are just one of many components required to make powerful computers and data centers and ultimately require advanced transmitters and receivers to continue.
The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
