Experimental demonstration of optical interconnects exploiting orbital angular momentum array

To improve the transmission capacity and integration level of future optical interconnect systems, we present a communication scheme using orbital angular momentum (OAM) array encoding/decoding. By optimizing the use of space dimension (spatially orthogonal modes and spatial positions), information carried by a single symbol can be greatly improved. Experiment demonstration of 625-element and 1296-element high-base OAM array encoding/decoding by employing an array with 4 spatial locations each with 5 and 6 possible OAM beams are presented. Direct detection and simultaneous multi-OAM demodulation method are used for decoding the encoded OAM arrays. Transmission of data signal and grey-scale image signal under atmospheric turbulence are also evaluated in the experiment.