Power-efficient fiber-optic communication

Internet traffic is experiencing an explosive growth. As a result, the fiber-optic communication systems, on which the Internet is based, will use a fifth of all the world’s electricity by 2030. This is not sustainable. Immediate actions are urgently needed to make future fiber-optic communication systems as power-efficient as possible. The ultimate limit of the minimum required power to transmit and recover the information is set by the amount of internal or fundamental noise associated with the transmitter and the receiver. My vision with the Villum Investigator grant is to build a world-class inter-disciplinary research environment that will use artificial intelligence to realize the transmitter and the receiver that exhibit the minimum amount of permissible noise, and find the most power-efficient approach for information transport over the fiber-optic networks.