Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have succeeded in encoding data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam, transmitting them over a distance of 50 km, and decoding them successfully. This is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam. The process developed by KIT allows to transmit the contents of 700 DVDs in one second only. The renowned journal “Nature Photonics” reports about this success in its latest issue (DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2011.74).
With this experiment, the KIT scientists in the team of Professor Jürg Leuthold beat their own record in high-speed data transmission of 2010, when they exceeded the magic limit of 10 terabits per second, i.e. a data rate of 10,000 billion bits per second. This success of the group is due to a new data decoding process.
