[Satellite TODAY 12-22-10] Raytheon BBN Technologies was awarded $2.1 million in funding by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for two projects under the Information in a Photon program.
     The goal of the projects is to develop techniques that enable optical communications and imaging systems to operate at their limits of information encoding efficiency and to increase power management, speed and reach on free space optical communication links, including far-field links used in deep space.
    Raytheon BBN Technologies will generate and demonstrate experimental solutions, such as multiple-spatial-mode design and adaptive joint-detection receivers, that attain communications at 10 bits-per-photon and 5-bits/sec/Hz while simultaneously encoding information in space and time.
    “Optical communications are far from ultimate performance and reaching the furthest limits of light’s information carrying capacity. We are developing techniques that greatly improve the performance of current optical communications and approach the quantum limits of light’s information carrying capacity,” Raytheon BBN Technologies Scientist Saikat Guha said in a statement.