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The modern world depends on good communication. If you were one of the few who didn't believe that, the recent obsession with video conferences should have convinced you otherwise. The key for video is volume: huge streams of data facilitated by high-capacity optical-fiber communications networks.
It might surprise you to hear that, actually, optical communication is not very efficient. A recent paper shows off a laser that may allow the information density to be increased by using something called orbital angular momentum (OAM).
Low-bandwidth light
Before we get into the dizzying world of light that corkscrews its way through life, let's see why light is used so inefficiently. An AM radio station might operate at a frequency of 500kHz and might use up to 5kHz of bandwidth, giving it a spectral efficiency of 1 percent. If we were to scale that up to optical frequencies, we should have a bandwidth of around 2THz, and you might expect data rates of 1Tb/s for a single wavelength.
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