https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210225113400.htm

The new work, reported in a paper published Thursday, Feb. 25, in the journal Nature Physics, throws wide open the amount of information that can be multiplexed, or simultaneously transmitted, by a coherent light source. A common example of multiplexing is the transmission of multiple telephone calls over a single wire, but there had been fundamental limits to the number of coherent twisted lightwaves that could be directly multiplexed.

"It's the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed," said study principal investigator Boubacar Kanté, the Chenming Hu 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."