Orbital angular momentum multiplexing

Imagine a spinning top, like the one you play with at home. When it spins fast, it creates a force that makes it stable and holds it in place. This force is called angular momentum, which is a type of energy that objects have when they spin around an axis.

Now, imagine if we could use this spinning energy to send information from one place to another. That's what scientists are doing with something called orbital angular momentum, or OAM for short.

OAM is like the different levels of energy that a spinning top can have. A spinning top can spin slowly or fast, and it can wobble as it spins. Scientists figured out how to create different levels of OAM, or different spinning energies, and use them to encode information.

They do this by sending beams of light that have different levels of OAM into a fiber-optic cable. Each beam of light carries a different piece of information, like a letter of the alphabet. The cable separates out the beams of light and sends them to a receiver, which reads the levels of OAM and decodes the information.

Think of it like a fancy way of sending secret messages. If you spin the top one way, it means "A", and if you spin it another way, it means "B". Scientists are using OAM to send messages even faster than they can with traditional fiber-optic cables, because they can send multiple beams of light at the same time.

So, in summary, orbital angular momentum multiplexing is a way of sending information using different levels of energy, like the different ways a spinning top can spin, which are then sent through a fiber-optic cable and separated out at the other end to decode the message.