Demonstration of orbital angular momentum channel healing using a Fabry-Pérot cavity

Abstract

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) mode division provides a promising solution to push past the already exhausted available degrees of freedom available in conventional optical communications. Nevertheless, the practical deployment of OAM within a free-space optical (FSO) communications system is still hampered by a major challenge, namely that OAM-based FSO links are vulnerable to disturbances. Though several techniques, such as using various non-diffraction beams and multiple transmit–receive apertures, are proposed to alleviate the influence of disturbances, these techniques significantly reduce the performance with regard to combating single fading for spatial blockages of the laser beam by obstructions. In this work, we initially demonstrate that a Fabry-Pérot resonant cavity has the ability to implement OAM mode healing, even for a blocking percentage of over 50%. Consequently, the proposed method will expand the use of OAM in the FSO secure communications and quantum encryption fields.

Keywords

• optical communication
• orbital angular momentum
• fabry-pérot cavity