Abstract
Bendable light beams have recently seen tremendous applications in optical manipulation, optical imaging, optical routing, micromachining, plasma generation and nonlinear optics. By exploiting curved light beams instead of traditional Gaussian beam for line-of-sight light communications, here we propose and demonstrate the viability of free-space data-carrying bendable light communications along arbitrary trajectories with multiple functionalities. By employing 39.06-Gbit/s 32-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (32-QAM) discrete multi-tone (DMT) signal, we demonstrate free-space bendable light intensity modulated direct detection (IM-DD) communication system under 3 different curved light paths. Moreover, we characterize multiple functionalities of free-space bendable light communications, including bypass obstructions transmission, self-healing transmission, self-broken trajectory transmission, and multi-receiver transmission. The observed results indicate that bendable light beams can make free-space optical communications more flexible, more robust and more multifunctional. The demonstrations may open a door to explore more special light beams enabling advanced free-space light communications with enhanced flexibility, robustness and functionality.
Highlights
Bendable light beams have recently seen tremendous applications in optical manipulation, optical imaging, optical routing, micromachining, plasma generation and nonlinear optics
Bendable light beams have received a great deal of attention because of their tremendous application potential in a diversity of fields such as optical manipulation[1,2,3], optical imaging[4,5], optical routing[6], micromachining[7], plasma generation[8] and nonlinear optics[9,10,11,12]
In contradistinction with the Bessel beam, the Airy beam possesses the properties of self-acceleration in addition to nondiffraction and self-healing, which propagates along a parabolic trajectory
Summary
Bendable light beams have recently seen tremendous applications in optical manipulation, optical imaging, optical routing, micromachining, plasma generation and nonlinear optics. By employing 39.06-Gbit/s 32-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (32-QAM) discrete multi-tone (DMT) signal, we demonstrate free-space bendable light intensity modulated direct detection (IM-DD) communication system under 3 different curved light paths. We characterize multiple functionalities of free-space bendable light communications, including bypass obstructions transmission, self-healing transmission, self-broken trajectory transmission, and multi-receiver transmission. In addition to Airy beam, bendable light beams can reconstruct their wavefront, and continue propagate along the preset trajectory[28,29]. Airy beams were employed for free space information transfer[36,37,38] They did not take full advantage of the bendable light beams to realize more functionalities. By employing 39.06-Gbit/s 32-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (32-QAM) discrete multi-tone (DMT) signal, we successfully demonstrate free-space bendable light intensity modulated direct detection (IM-DD) communication system using 3 different curved light paths. We characterize the transmission performance under 4 different conditions: (i) bypass obstructions communication; (ii) self-healing communication; (iii) self-broken trajectory communication; (iv) movable multireceiver communication
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