The massive transfer of data over the Internet that is vital to today's economy in our information society would not be possible without the crucial role played by fibre optics communication. Every time a node of the Internet sends information, it encodes a sequence of digital bits composing the message into light pulses. These light pulses are later sent through an optical fibre to a receiving node that converts the light signal back to the original sequence of bits. The increase demand for higher data transfer raises the natural question on what are the fundamental physical limits to the information transmission rate over optical links. Raul García-Patrón, former member of the Theory Division of Professor Ignacio Cirac at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, with collaborators from Pisa, Brussels and Moscow, has recently answered this question, concluding a research program that started during his Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship at the MPQ between the years 2011 and 2013.
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