A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, Physics Department has taken the information transfer a new level by developing a novel free-space optical communication system. The team of researchers was led by Bosanta Ranjan Boruah, a faculty member of physics at IIT Guwahati, and Santanu Konwar, an assistant professor at the department of physics, Abhayapuri College resulted in this development, the IIT-G said in a statement.

In a free-space communication, data in the form of voice, text or image is transmitted using light through wireless rather than through optical fibres and it represents the next generation of communications technology.  The results of this path breaking work has recently been published in ?Communications Physics https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-020-00468-1 a journal published by Nature Publishing Group. The most development in the free-space communication systems uses vortex beam to encode the data. But the data transmitted through wireless using light/laser beams, can become corrupted when transmitted using vortex beam. 

To overcome this problem, IIT people for the first time, used orthogonal spatial light modes called Zernike modes to encode the data and to transmit the same robustly in the form of the phase profile of a laser beam. Konwar said, ?In addition to eliminating errors in communication, our system is also insulated from hacking and interloping, because the receiver decodes the transmitted beam by measuring the phase and not the power of the light beam, with prior knowledge about the strength and types of Zernike modes used, which make it more secure than wired and other conventional wireless forms of communication". A demonstration has been made on the distortion-free transmission of text messages and images over distance of one kilometre even in the presence of turbulence such as during a stormy weather. 

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