Nanoscale Device Simultaneously Steers and Shifts Frequency of Optical Light, Pointing the Way to Future Wireless Communication Channels (IMAGE)
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In a paper published July 24 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, a team of Caltech engineers reports building a metasurface patterned with miniscule tunable antennas capable of reflecting an incoming beam of optical light to create many sidebands, or channels, of different optical frequencies.
"With these metasurfaces, we've been able to show that one beam of light comes in, and multiple beams of light go out, each with different optical frequencies and going in different directions," says Harry Atwater, the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and senior author on the new paper. "It's acting like an entire array of communication channels. And we've found a way to do this for free-space signals rather than signals carried on an optical fiber."
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