Researchers Demonstrate Noise-Free Communication with Structured Light

Patterns of light hold tremendous promise for a large encoding alphabet in optical communications but progress is hindered by their susceptibility to distortion, such as in atmospheric turbulence or in bent optical fiber. Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) have outlined a new optical communication protocol that exploits spatial patterns of light for multi-dimensional encoding in a manner that does not require the patterns to be recognized, thus overcoming the prior limitation of modal distortion in noisy channels.