Gizmodo reports:
a team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden [hit] 1.84 Pbit/s with a new chip that uses just a single laser. That’s the equivalent of moving “twice the total global Internet traffic,” all in one second.
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As detailed in a paper recently published in the Nature Photonics journal, the research team developed a new optical chip that functions as something called a frequency comb. Light from a single infrared laser source enters the chip, where it’s split into a rainbow spectrum of hundreds of different colors that can each be encoded with data by modulating three specific properties of each frequency: its amplitude, phase, and polarization. Those hundreds of specially modulated frequencies are then recombined back into a single beam, which is transmitted down a fiber optic cable, and then decoded on the other end.
