this video that you're watching right
now is data that's being transferred to
you through a wire which is then decoded
making it into something viewable on
your device and that's the internet
bada-bing bada-boom no I'm just kidding
it's a lot more complicated than that
but part of what we call the Internet is
information that travels through wires
from servers satellites data centers or
other computers to your personal router
these wires are more formally known as
fiber-optic cable and did you notice the
important part of that name fiber-optic
cable that's because all that data the
information being transferred to you as
you request it from your web browser on
your desktop or the banking app on your
phone physically travels through the
wires in the form of light pulses of
light are sent from the data's point of
origin through the cable photons
bouncing around inside that cable travel
to the other end where there's some kind
of receiver like a photo diode or a
photoelectric cell and this device is
what translates those packets of light
in their given pattern back into
electrical information that your
computer can then understand and present
to you as the information you asked for
like a webpage that's crazy right well
it's about to get even crazier new
research has just demonstrated the
feasibility of the world's first nano
photonic device see in most standard
systems we currently only use a fraction
of lights capacity to transmit data and
this is because we haven't previously
had the technology to decode anything
else but new efforts are making use of
light beyond the visible spectrum like
ultraviolet waves and in this version of
data transmission the light is not just
photons pinging around reflecting their
way down the inside of the cable the
light waves both visible and not
oscillate in a particular way to form a
twisted pattern also known as orbital
angular momentum or twisted light
because twisted light is made up of more
modes of light that light is able to
carry more information in fact because
the light traveling through the fiber is
made up of different kinds of twists
they can even overlap with one another
each carrying a different data stream
all at the same time without interfering
with each other but we have to have
something at the other end of that fiber
that can then decode all that packing
information right and this brand-new
nanophotonics if can do exactly that
using something called ultra-thin
complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor
technology which is quite a mouthful the
team has successfully demonstrated what
they call compact high precision angular
momentum nano metrology man that vocab
is something else
I liked it when we were just calling a
twisted light basically the technology
we used to have to decode even a smidgen
of that twisted light data was the size
of a table and now it's the size of an
ultra-thin wafer that fits onto the end
of an optical fiber bringing us a little
closer to the use of twisted light in
the real world because the thing is we
don't just use fiber optic cable for
accessing the bountiful power of the
Internet we also now use it to carry our
phone conversations to broadcast TV and
even in medical applications to measure
vital patient statistics like cell pH or
the presence of medicine or toxins in
the bloodstream vastly enhancing the
amount of data that can be sent through
fiber optic cable and then importantly
processed and translated at
never-before-seen speeds and in a usable
way could transform our whole
informational world chances are though
this won't be used to bring the consumer
that much more computing power it's more
applicable in cases like finding better
ways to communicate with vehicles in
space or potentially providing a way for
us to process and use the information
that would hypothetically come from
quantum computers which would be leaps
away from the complexity and size of the
data that we work with in our current
computing systems what can we say the
future looks bright twisted right fun
fact reportedly 99% of international
data passes through wires at the bottom
of the ocean called submarine
communications cables thousands of miles
long thanks for always coming back to
secret for your breaking science and
tech news and don't forget to subscribe
to be the first to know how this
technology goes into action for more
like this check out this video on
ferroelectricity here and we'll see you
next time