Scientists Bent Light to Curve 6G Beams, and It Might Make the Internet Unstoppable
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The promise of next-gen 6G infrastructure is high bandwidth, but that requires higher frequencies, which are notoriously easily to disrupt due to various physical obstacles.
A new study tries to get around this limitation by creating a transmitter capable of manipulating “self-accelerating beams” in order to curve signals around these obstacles.
Although this technique doesn’t solve all of the shortcomings of high-frequency communications, it’s the best method so far for maintaining a reliable data connection.
With the ever-increasing need for higher bandwidth, telecommunication companies are now working hard on future 6G technologies (and if some foreign governments are to be believed, that transition is already underway). Much like 5G before it, this standard will use higher frequencies for the ability to pack more data into higher bandwidths.
But creating these networks isn’t as easy as just bumping everything up to terahertz frequencies and calling it a day. That’s because higher frequencies are more easily disrupted by obstacles (i.e. walls, buildings, people). So, if you have line-of-sight on a theoretical 6G router, you’re living the data-rich life of your futuristic dreams. But if you decide to move to another room, you’re back in the Stone Age.
However, a new study from Brown University and Rice University highlights a new technique that could get around this 6G limitation—quite literally. The research team designed special transmitters that can effectively “bend” light around an object to maintain a connection using “self-accelerating beams,” which are electromagnetic waves that naturally curve when traveling through space. The results of the study were published in late March in the journal Communications Engineering.
“This is the world’s first curved data link, a critical milestone in realizing the 6G vision of high data rate and high reliability," Rice University’s Edward Knightly, a co-author on the study, said in a press statement.
To create this curved data link, the team created a transmitter that can manipulate the beams strength, intensity, and timing, and can adjust to blockages by moving data along pre-designed patterns. When one of these patterns is blocked, it moves to the next, and then the next so the link remains intact. This allows a terahertz beam to effectively move around obstacles to remain a connection, but the technique isn’t perfect. For example, if the signal is completely blocked by, say, a closed interior room, the signal has no way to establish a connection—it can’t travel through walls like lower frequencies can.
“Curving a beam doesn’t solve all possible blockage problems, but what it does is solve some of them and it solves them in a way that's better than what others have tried,” University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Hichem Guerboukha, who was the leader of the study as a postdoctoral researcher at Brown, said in a press statement.
The researchers still have to quantify exactly how far and how much these transmitters can curve a beam, but they’ve got plenty of time—6G communications is still in its infancy. However, for this technology to grow up into the backbone of the information age, it’ll require even more similar breakthroughs in electromagnetic manipulation.
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