WASHINGTON—Radio waves that move like pasta spirals could help unclog the wireless world by boosting the power of radio communications, Italian and Swedish researchers said Friday.
The new way to make radio signals more potent without boosting bandwidth is described in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics edition of March 2.
“In a three-dimensional perspective, this phase twist looks like a fusillli-pasta-shaped beam,” lead study author Fabrizio Tamburini was quoted as telling the science website PhysOrg.
“Each of these twisted beams can be independently generated, propagated and detected even in the very same frequency band, behaving as independent communication channels.”
That means they do not move linearly like all current forms of radio communications do, and they do not need more bandwidth to increase their transmission capacity.
“Now, the wide use of wireless communication has unavoidably led to the saturation of all available frequency bands, even after the adoption of artificial techniques that increase band capacity,” said the study.
“This might represent a concrete proposal for a possible solution to the band saturation problem.”
Tamburini told Nature magazine that his technique can boost radio power by up to nine times its current strength, and that the technology may be ready for market in the next two to five years.