Encoding information in the mutual coherence of spatially separated light beams
Optics
2022-09-14 v1 Signal Processing
Abstract
Coherence has been used as a resource for optical communications since its earliest days. It is widely used for multiplexing of data, but not for encoding of data. Here we introduce a coding scheme, which we call \textit{mutual coherence coding}, to encode information in the mutual coherence of spatially separated light beams. We describe its implementation and analyze its performance by deriving the relevant figures of merit (signal-to-noise ratio, maximum bit-rate, and spectral efficiency) with respect to the number of transmitted beams. Mutual coherence coding yields a quadratic scaling of the number of transmitted signals with the number of employed light beams, which might have benefits for cryptography and data security.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.01364,
title = {Encoding information in the mutual coherence of spatially separated light beams},
author = {Alfonso Nardi and Shawn Divitt and Massimiliano Rossi and Felix Tebbenjohanns and Andrei Militaru and Martin Frimmer and Lukas Novotny},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.01364},
year = {2022}
}