A trillion turns of light nets terahertz polarized bytes

Alessandro Alabastri (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University) Nanophotonics researchers demonstrate ultrafast polarization switching U.S. and Italian engineers have demonstrated the first nanophotonic platform capable of manipulating polarized light 1 trillion times per second. "Polarized light can be used to encode bits of information, and we've shown it's possible to modulate such light at terahertz frequencies,” said Rice University's Alessandro Alabastri , co-corresponding author of a study published this week. "This could potentially be used in wireless communications,” said Alabastri, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Rice's Brown School of Engineering. "The higher the operating frequency of a signal, the faster it can transmit data. One terahertz equals 1,000 gigahertz, which is about 25 times higher than the operating frequencies of commercially available optical polarization switches. The research was a collaboration between experimental and theoretical teams at Rice , the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico) and the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa. This collaboration started in the summer of 2017, when study co-first author Andrea Schirato was a visiting scholar in the Rice lab of physicist and co-author Peter Nordlander.