Free-space information transfer using light beams carrying orbital angular momentum.

By Graham M. Gibson, Johannes Courtial, Miles J. Padgett, M. Vasnetsov, V. Pas'ko, Stephen M. Barnett, Sonja Franke-Arnold. Optics Express, 2004

2,220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We demonstrate the transfer of information encoded as orbital angular momentum (OAM) states of a light beam. The transmitter and receiver units are based on spatial light modulators, which prepare or measure a laser beam in one of eight pure OAM states. We show that the information encoded in this way is resistant to eavesdropping in the sense that any attempt to sample the beam away from its axis will be subject to an angular restriction and a lateral offset, both of which result in inherent uncertainty in the measurement. This gives an experimental insight into the effects of aperturing and misalignment of the beam on the OAM measurement and demonstrates the uncertainty relationship for OAM.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a145d8e7158476d0930c679a8777872928426af

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Angular diffraction (2009, methodology): “·L| | p ( 2r(2) w(z)2 ) e −ikz(1+ r2 2(z2+z2 R ) ) e−i(2p+| |+1)ArcTan(z/zR)e−i , (9)”
Structured Light: Ideas and Concepts (2020, background): “For example, the binary information can be easily encoded by two possible states of circular polarization [2] as well as by discrete set of OV-carrying modes differing by the topological charges; in the latter case, the multidimensional quantum space with the orthogonal functional basis becomes real”
Communication with spatially modulated light through turbulent air across Vienna (2014, methodology): “The only two experiments that go beyond typical laboratory distances are in [26], which analyses a classical OAM mode transmission over 15 meters, and in [27], which uses a polarization-OAM hybrid system for quantum key distribution over 210 meters.”
Creation and detection of optical modes with spatial light modulators (2016, neutral): “Figure adapted with permission from [113].”
Optical Communication in Space: Challenges and Mitigation Techniques (2017, neutral): “possibility to generate and analyze states with different OAM by using interferometric or holographic methods [386]–[388] permits the development of energy-efficient FSO communi-”
Advances in communications using optical vortices (2016, methodology): “OAM beams were generated for OAM coding/decoding [68].”