Simulating thick atmospheric turbulence in the lab with application to orbital angular momentum communication

We describe a procedure by which a long ( $\gtrsim 1\,\text{km}$ ) optical path through atmospheric turbulence can be experimentally simulated in a controlled fashion and scaled down to distances easily accessible in a laboratory setting. This procedure is then used to simulate a 1 km long free-spac...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Brandon Rodenburg, Mohammad Mirhosseini, Mehul Malik, Omar S Magaña-Loaiza, Michael Yanakas, Laura Maher, Nicholas K Steinhoff, Glenn A Tyler, Robert W Boyd
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing 2014-01-01
Series:New Journal of Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/16/3/033020
Description
Summary:We describe a procedure by which a long ( $\gtrsim 1\,\text{km}$ ) optical path through atmospheric turbulence can be experimentally simulated in a controlled fashion and scaled down to distances easily accessible in a laboratory setting. This procedure is then used to simulate a 1 km long free-space communication link in which information is encoded in orbital angular momentum spatial modes. We also demonstrate that standard adaptive optics methods can be used to mitigate many of the effects of thick atmospheric turbulence.
ISSN:1367-2630