Spatiotemporal Topological Combs for Robust High-Dimensional Information Transmission

Time-varying orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams are fascinating due to their rich physics and essentially unbounded degrees of freedom. Yet, despite this promise, their practical use in high-capacity communication has not been demonstrated. We introduce a spatiotemporal topological comb (ST-Comb) as a new information carrier, leveraging both the temporal and topological structure of light. By encoding data on terahertz-rate optical burst carriers, our scheme shifts the signal beyond the conventional noise band, achieving lock-inlike robustness. A programmable all-degree-of-freedom (All-DoF) modulator generates ST-Combs that populate a vast, high-entropy state space for highdimensional information encoding. Combined with a self-reference GuideStar mechanism, our approach provides near-perfect common-mode noise cancellation, enabling virtually loss-free information recovery. Experimentally, we demonstrate a record information density of 154 bits per wavepacket with 100% fidelity, maintained in outdoor free-space links. These results chart a path to chip-scale, reconfigurable photonics for the petahertz era, opening opportunities for high-capacity optical interconnects in AI data centers and expanding the boundaries of light–matter interactions.