High-fidelity spatial mode transmission through a 1-km-long multimode fiber via vectorial time reversal
Abstract
The large number of spatial modes supported by standard multimode fibers is a promising platform for boosting the channel capacity of quantum and classical communications by orders of magnitude. However, the practical use of long multimode fibers is severely hampered by modal crosstalk and polarization mixing. To overcome these challenges, we develop and experimentally demonstrate a vectorial time reversal technique, which is accomplished by digitally pre-shaping the wavefront and polarization of the forward-propagating signal beam to be the phase conjugate of an auxiliary, backward-propagating probe beam. Here, we report an average modal fidelity above 80% for 210 Laguerre-Gauss and Hermite-Gauss modes by using vectorial time reversal over an unstabilized 1-km-long fiber. We also propose a practical and scalable spatial-mode-multiplexed quantum communication protocol over long multimode fibers to illustrate potential applications that can be enabled by our technique.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.09883,
title = {High-fidelity spatial mode transmission through a 1-km-long multimode fiber via vectorial time reversal},
author = {Yiyu Zhou and Boris Braverman and Alexander Fyffe and Runzhou Zhang and Jiapeng Zhao and Alan E. Willner and Zhimin Shi and Robert W. Boyd},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.09883},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Supplementary Information is included