Orbital angular momentum beams generated by passive dielectric phase masks and their performance in a communication link

Zhe Wang*, Yan Yan, Amir Arbabi, Guodong Xie, Cong Liu, Zhe Zhao, Yongxiong Ren, Long Li, Nisar Ahmed, Asher J. Willner, Ehsan Arbabi, Andrei Faraon, Robert Bock, Solyman Ashrafi, Moshe Tur, Alan E. Willner

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

We demonstrate the generation of orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams using high-efficient polarization-insensitive phase masks. The OAM beams generated by the phase masks are characterized in terms of their tolerance to misalignment (lateral displacement or tilt) between the incident beam and phase mask. For certain scenarios, our results show that (a) when the tilt angle is within the range of −20 to 20 deg, the crosstalk among modes is less than −15 dB; and (b) lateral displacement of 0.3 mm could cause a large amount of power leaked to adjacent modes. Finally, OAM beams generated by the phase masks are demonstrated over a two-channel OAM-multiplexing link, each channel carrying a 40 Gbit/s data stream. An optical signal-to-noise-ratio (OSNR) penalty of ∼1 dB is measured without crosstalk at the bit error rate (BER) of 3.8 × 10−3. With crosstalk, an OSNR penalty of <1.5 dB is observed at the same BER.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2746-2749
Number of pages4
JournalOptics Letters
Volume42
Issue number14
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Jul 2017

Funding

FundersFunder number
Basic Research Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) President’s and Director’s fund
National Science FoundationIIP-1622777
Office of Naval ResearchN00014-16-1-2813

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