New communications technology: Super-fast optical lasers

Science Daily  November 9, 2022 While enabling orders-of-magnitude gains in data rates, optical signals impose much stricter pointing requirements and are strongly affected by atmospheric turbulence. Researchers in Australia established a coherent 1550 nm link across turbulent atmosphere between a deployable optical terminal and a drone-mounted retroreflector. Through 10 Hz machine vision optical tracking with nested 200 Hz tip/tilt adaptive optics stabilisation, they corrected for pointing errors and atmospheric turbulence to maintain robust single mode fiber coupling, resulting in an uninterrupted 100 Gbps optical data link while tracking at angular rates of up to 1.5 deg/s, equivalent to that of […]