The researchers used a specially designed metasurface to direct the Airy beam transmissions. Credit: Aaron Nathans/Princeton University
Like a football sent curving around an opposing team’s players and into their goal during a free kick, researchers are bending a type of high-energy microwave radiation around solid obstacles to unlock new bandwidths for wireless data transmission.
“As our world becomes more connected and data-hungry, the demand for wireless bandwidth is soaring,” says Yasaman Ghasempour, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University in the US.
“Sub-terahertz frequencies open the door to far greater speeds and capacity.”
Ghasempour is lead author of a new study in Nature Communications that brings us closer to transmitting data via ultrahigh frequency microwaves (100–300 gigahertz), which the authors say will play a critical role in next-generation wireless technologies.
“This work tackles a long-standing problem that has prevented the adoption of such high frequencies in dynamic wireless communications to date,” Ghasempour says.
Sub-terahertz signals can be blocked by objects or people obstructing the line-of-sight between a transmitter and receiver. This makes them particularly challenging to deploy indoors and in areas where people and objects move around a lot.
Ghasempour’s team has designed a system which transmits the signal as a type of wave which can curve around obstructions without spreading out and losing its intensity.
These so-called ‘Airy beams’ were proposed theoretically in 1979 but weren’t observed experimentally until 2007.
“In Airy beams, waves asymmetrically accelerate in the transverse direction without the need for an external potential,” the authors write.
Haoze Chen, a graduate student at Princeton and the paper’s lead author, explains that there are infinite ways of curving an Airy beam, depending on the degree of the curve and where the curve happens.
“People have shown that these beams can be created, but they have not shown how the beams can be optimised,” he says. “What we are doing is not only generating the beams but finding which beams work best in the situation.”
a. The radiation pattern of a self-healing finite-energy Airy beam. b. A desired Airy beam generated at a specified distance and orientation. c. An infinite number of feasible Airy trajectories can be configured between the transmitter to the receiver. This shows 3 examples. d. The received power of the 3 example beam configurations with and without the blocker. Credit: Chen et al 2025, Nature Communications, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62443-0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
To do this the team trained a deep-learning-based framework to solve for the optimal trajectory of an Airy beam to deliver maximum power to a wireless receiver while avoiding an obstacle.
Experiments showed the scheme was able to adapt Airy beams on the fly to circumvent a moving obstacle, and to reach a moving receiver.
“With further advances, we envision transmitters that can intelligently navigate even the most complex environments, bringing ultra-fast, reliable wireless connectivity to applications that today seem out of reach – from immersive virtual reality to fully autonomous transportation,” says Ghasempour.