Australian scientists have found a way to make Internet 100 times faster with this small device

• Australian scientists have announced a new device that can multiply the speed of the Internet by 100.
• The nanophotonic device encodes more data and processes it faster using a special form of twisted light.
• RMIT's Dr. Haoran Ren explains that the tiny nanophotonic camera is the missing key for ultra-fast, high-speed communications.

Australian scientists have created a device that can multiply Internet throughput 100 times by exploiting twisted light beams to carry more data and process it faster.

Broadband optical fibers carry information on light pulses, at the speed of light, through optical fibers. But the way light is coded at one end and processed at the other affects the speed of the data.

The new nanophotonic device, announced today in Nature Communications, encodes more data and processes it faster using a special form of twisted light.

Dr. Haoran Ren of the RMIT School of Science, co-lead author of the paper, states that a tiny nanophotonic twisted light reading device is the missing key for ultra-fast and ultra-wide band communications.

"Today's optical communications are heading towards a lack of capacity because they are failing to meet the ever-increasing demands of big data," says Ren.

"What we have been able to do is accurately transmit the data through the light to its maximum capacity, so as to enable us to significantly increase our bandwidth."

Current fiber optic communications, such as that used in the Australian NBN, use only a fraction of the actual light capacity by carrying data on the color spectrum.

Broadband technologies under development use the oscillation, or shape, of light waves to encode data, thereby increasing bandwidth by also using invisible light.

The latter technology transports data on light waves that have been twisted spirally to increase their capacity. This is what light is called in a state of orbital angular momentum, or OAM.

In 2016, the same group of RMIT's Nanophotonics Artificial Intelligence Synthesis Lab published a research article in the journal Science that described how they managed to decode a small range of this twisted light on a nanophotonic chip.

However, the technology for detecting a wide range of OAM sources for optical communications has not been viable to date.

According to Professor Min Gu, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at RMIT, the materials used in the device are compatible with the silicon-based materials used in most technologies, which facilitates the scaling up of industrial applications.

"Our OAM nanoelectronic detector is like an" eye "that can" see "the information conveyed by a twisted light and decode it to understand it through electronics," he explains.

"The high performance of this technology, its low cost and small size make it a viable application for the next generation of broadband optical communications.

"It corresponds to the scale of existing fiber technology and could be used to increase the bandwidth, or even the processing speed, of this fiber more than 100 times over the next two years. This easy scalability and the considerable impact it will have on telecommunications are what is so exciting. "

The paper, titled Nanometrology of Angular Momentum in an Ultrathin Topological Insulating Film for Plasmonic Topological Insulators, was co-authored by Dr. Zengji Yue, Associate Researcher at the University of Wollongong.