Research team finds way to use photon shape to encode messages
Friday, August 17, 2012 - 06:50
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org) -- In their quest to find the perfect encryption technique, scientists have often looked to light, or more specifically, photons. Current techniques allow for sending signals as 1’s or 0’s based on the polarization of individual photons, i.e. they are either vertical or horizontal. But now it appears there is a better way, using the unique shape of photons to represent as many characters as needed, the alphabet, for example. A team of international researchers has, as they describe in their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, found a way to use lasers to identify unique shapes of photons and to then recover information that was encoded in them.