[qu1mby]

Whoa. Anyone have any ideas for use cases? The article mentions manipulating tiny materials - like what? How would that work?

[nsajko]

See "Laser Manipulation of Atoms and Particles" for an introduction to the subject: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.253.5022.861

[mNovak]

Applied to microwaves in particular, modulating wave properties is how we transfer data. New ways to pack more bits per Hz are always useful.

[TheGrassyKnoll]

Get your patents now...

[madengr]

Problem is OAM does not work for long distances.

[mNovak]

Can you elaborate? I've seen OAM at the conferences but not super familiar

[madengr]

As the beam diverges, you need larger and larger receive antennas to discriminate between the modes, more aperture than you need to compensate for path loss. That seems to be why OAM research is now mmWave (better collimating) and more applicable to short range backhaul.

[BlueTemplar]

There certainly seems to be a lot of research in the field of telecommunications : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_angular_momentum_multi...

[mooman219]

Looks like this could improve bandwidth of free space connections, like satellite or directed beams.

[terminalhealth]

What are the limitations in applying this to mobile communication?

[mNovak]

Very hard to track a beam between moving terminals

[mqus]

"manipulating tiny materials" - I thought of semiconductor manufacturing, for litography... but I'm not an expert at all.

[kalekold]

Google for Optical Tweezers

[ryanthedev]

Quantum Computer.