Our recently research “Unscrambling light—automatically undoing strong mixing between modes”, published in Light: Science & Applications has been chosen as one of the most 30 relevant publications of 2017 by the Optical Society of America.
The outcome of the research is an optical device capable of unscrambling light beams that have arbitrarily mixed because of transmission through a multimode channel. With respect to conventional techniques, requiring optical/electrical conversion and a complex signal processing, this device allows for a considerable energy saving and data processing speed increase. The enabling technology behind is a non-invasive light detector, recently patented by Politecnico di Milano, which allows a simple real time automatic control of the photonic device without the need for photon tapping from the signal.
The research is the result of a collaboration between the Photonic Devices Group, the I3N lab and Stanford University and has been partially carried out at Polifab, the new micro and nanotechnology centre of Politecnico di Milano.
The highlight article has been included in the special issue “Year in Optics 2017” of Optics & Photonics News, the main magazine of the Optical Society of America, and is available at this link.
The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union’s Seventh FP7 Programme (Grant agreement No. 323734, BBOI), from the European Union’s H2020 Programme (Grant No. 688172, STREAMS), from Fondazione Cariplo (Grant No. 2016-0881, ACTIO) and by Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative grant (Air Force Office of Scientific Research, FA9550-12-1-0024).