Influence of atmospheric turbulence on states of light carrying orbital angular momentum

Creators: Rodenburg, Brandon; Lavery, Martin P. J.; Malik, Mehul; O'Sullivan, Malcolm N.; Mirhosseini, Mohammad; Robertson, David J.; Padgett, Miles; Boyd, Robert W.

Abstract

We have experimentally studied the degradation of mode purity for light beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) propagating through simulated atmospheric turbulence. The turbulence is modeled as a randomly varying phase aberration, which obeys statistics postulated by Kolmogorov turbulence theory. We introduce this simulated turbulence through the use of a phase-only spatial light modulator. Once the turbulence is introduced, the degradation in mode quality results in crosstalk between OAM modes. We study this crosstalk in OAM for 11 modes, showing that turbulence uniformly degrades the purity of all the modes within this range, irrespective of mode number.

Additional Information

© 2012 Optical Society of America. Received May 31, 2012; revised July 24, 2012; accepted July 24, 2012; posted July 26, 2012 (Doc. ID 169439); published August 31, 2012. We acknowledge Daniel Gauthier and Jonathan Leach for helpful discussions. Our work was primarily supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) InPho program through the U.S. Army Research Office award W911NF-10-1-0395. MPJL was further supported by European collaboration EC FP7 255914, PHORBITECH, and MJP is supported by the Royal Society.

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