Light is increasingly the center of technology, to transmit information in quantities and speeds never seen before.

Speak about Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) it is no longer a novelty, but a new study puts light even more at the center of the future of communication technology.

Researchers from the Politecnico di Milano, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Rice University have discovered a technique that paves the way for the development of optical communication technologies in which information is encoded within the very structure of light. .

With this new technology it would be possible to communicate more securely and reliably at speeds millions of times faster than today.

Thanks to advanced nanofabrication it is possible to create ultra-thin materials (metasurfaces) to design internally on the computer. These are very thin materials, a layer of gold a thousand times thinner than a hair, on which cross-shaped structures (billions in a square centimeter) are engraved.

Once illuminated by laser pulses, the optical properties of this surface change for a very short portion of a second (1 picosecond), in which it is possible to write into the structure through a second beam of very high frequency light. Thanks to this frequency (one million million hertz) it is possible to transmit the light beam safely and reliably.

With this technique, optical fibers would not be needed to transmit huge amounts of data.

This is a promising technology, which is not afraid of interceptions or atmospheric disturbances.