Highlights
- In the experiments, researchers used the setup to transmit data at 1.84 Pbit per second encoded in 223 wavelength channels, down a 7.9 kilometre-long optical fibre
- To put things into perspective, global internet bandwidth is estimated at around 1 Pbit per second
The record for data transmission using a single light source and the optical chip has been broken once again, with data transmissions at a rate of 1.84 petabits per second — double the global internet traffic per second — using a novel photonic chip design, reveals a report by New Atlas.
To put things in perspective, one petabit is equal to a million gigabits. Our homes barely get internet in Megabits, although some people are lucky enough to have Gigabit connections, still, this is several times faster than that.
Conducted by researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology, what makes this feat even more impressive is the use of a single light source and a single optical chip to achieve this. An IR laser beamed into a chip dubbed a frequency comb that split the light into hundreds of different frequencies and colours.
This data was later encoded into the light by modulating the amplitude, phase and polarisation of each of these frequencies, before refusing them into one beam and transmitting it via an optical fibre.
In the experiments, researchers used the setup to transmit data at 1.84 Pbit per second encoded in 223 wavelength channels, down a 7.9 kilometre-long optical fibre which consisted of 37 separate cores.
To put things into perspective, global internet bandwidth is estimated at around 1 Pbit per second. This means the system is capable of handling all of that at once with a good amount of bandwidth to grow too.
This setup is way faster than the previous record of 1.02 Pbut per second, which was set sometime in May this year.
However, the new chip is still nowhere close to finishing, in terms of breaking records. With the help of a computational model to scale the data transmission capacity of the system, researchers believe that it could even go as high as 100 Pbit per second.
Professor Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe, the lead author of the study, explained, “The reason for this is that our solution is scalable – both in terms of creating many frequencies and in terms of splitting the frequency comb into many spatial copies and then optically amplifying them, and using them as parallel sources with which we can transmit data. Although the comb copies must be amplified, we do not lose the qualities of the comb, which we utilise for spectrally efficient data transmission.”
