Free-space communication through turbulence: a comparison of plane-wave and orbital-angular-momentum encodings
Abstract
Free-space communication allows one to use spatial mode encoding, which is susceptible to the effects of diffraction and turbulence. Here, we discuss the optimum communication modes of a system while taking such effects into account. We construct a free-space communication system that encodes information onto the plane-wave (PW) modes of light. We study the performance of this system in the presence of atmospheric turbulence, and compare it with previous results for a system employing orbital-angular-momentum (OAM) encoding. We are able to show that the PW basis is the preferred basis set for communication through atmospheric turbulence for a large Fresnel number system. This study has important implications for high-dimensional quantum key distribution systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1304.0709,
title = {Free-space communication through turbulence: a comparison of plane-wave and orbital-angular-momentum encodings},
author = {Mohammad Mirhosseini and Brandon Rodenburg and Mehul Malik and Robert W. Boyd},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.0709},
year = {2013}
}