Atmospheric turbulence effects on the performance of a free space optical link employing orbital angular momentum multiplexing

 Optics Letters 2013 , Volume 38 , Issue 20 , Page 4062. 

Yongxiong Ren, Hao Huang, Guodong Xie, Nisar Ahmed, Yan Yan, Baris I. Erkmen, Nivedita Chandrasekaran, Martin P. J. Lavery, Nicholas K. Steinhoff, Moshe Tur, Samuel Dolinar, Mark Neifeld, Miles J. Padgett, Robert W. Boyd, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, and Alan E. Willner

 

Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA and

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109, USA and

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA and

School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK and

The Optical Sciences Company, P.O. Box 25309, Anaheim, California 92825, USA and

School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 69978, Israel and

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA and

Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.

 

Abstract

 

We experimentally investigate the performance of an orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexed free space optical (FSO) communication link through emulated atmospheric turbulence. The turbulence effects on the crosstalk and system power penalty of the FSO link are characterized. The experimental results show that the power of the transmitted OAM mode will tend to spread uniformly onto the neighboring mode in medium-to-strong turbulence, resulting in severe crosstalk at the receiver. The power penalty is found to exceed 10 dB in a weak-to-medium turbulence condition due to the turbulence-induced crosstalk and power fluctuation of the received signal.

© 2013 Optical Society of America

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