A FREE-SPACE OPTICAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM WITH SINGULAR MULTIPLEXING OF CHANNELS

The paper demonstrates the practical implementation of a free-space optical communication system with singular-channel multiplexing, in which the aggregated arrivals are formed as an incoherent superposition of optical vortex beams.It is experimentally shown that elementary optical vortex beams can be separated by diffracting the aggregated arrivals on a vortex hologram.With the right choice of system parameters, a sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio can be achieved even if the center of the aggregated arrivals shifts relative to the center of the analyzing vortex hologram.