The Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB) of the Politecnico di Milano has realized an optical device able to perform the reconstruction of light beams, transmitted simultaneously on the same fiber at the same wavelength, so much more efficient than the past, manipulating photons directly.
It is an extremely small silicon device (about 1 mm2), consisting of a mesh of integrated optical combiners that allow to separate the light beams, in any way they are mixed together. As to untangle a skein whose threads are intertwined with nodes that change continuously over time ...
The invention, published in the prestigious Light magazine, was selected by the Optical Society of America as one of the 30 most relevant works obtained from research in the field of optics in 2017.
The work was financed by the Cariplo Foundation within the program ACTIO project (Advanced Control Technologies for Integrated
Optics, Ref. 2016-0881) led by Francesco Morichetti, and the European H2020 ICT STREAMS project.
The research activity was carried out at the Photonic Devices Lab, the Innovative Integrated Instrumentation for the Nanoscience, I3N Lab, and Polifab, the micro and nanotechnology center of the Politecnico di Milano.
The scenarios opened by this invention are many, because it increased our ability to manipulate the light signals and exploit their full potential through programmable photonic processors. Applications are not limited to the telecommunications field, but also to image processing and sensor electronics, to privacy, to neural networks and quantum computing.
The full paper is available at
https://www.nature.com/articles/lsa2017110.