On 23 May, Professor Yang Chunyong’s team from the School of Electronics and Information Engineering published an article High-order OAM states unwrapping in multiplexed optical links on APL Photonics, a top journal of Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has been also included in the Editor’s pick of the journal, demonstrating their new research progress in the study of orbital angular momentum(OAM) pattern detection in the field of optical wireless communications.
The discovery of optical OAM has changed how we use and understand light. In recent years, vortex beams have been used in a wide range of applications including optical communications, optical imaging, quantum information processing, optical micromanipulation, remote sensing and super-resolution microscopy, whose OAM mode detection is now one of the key technologies and challenging research directions in practical applications. In particular, OAM brings a whole new degree of freedom that can effectively enhance the communication capacity, transmission capability and spectral efficiency of the system, and make a breakthrough in the communication technology to achieve high-capacity, high-rate and stable transmission of optical communication.
Professor Chunyong Yang’ team discovered a new OAM mode detection method in June 2022, which breaks the limitations of traditional detection methods by combining an auxiliary Gaussian beam and a circular phase grating to obtain perfect spiral stripes in the far-field diffraction pattern. The solution eliminates the commonly used diaphragm in the experimental setup, reduces the adjustment of grating parameters in the conventional method, improves detection efficiency and reduces experimental complexity, whose results are twice as high as the conventional method, with over 270 orders of single OAM patterns identifiable. The research result Annular phase grating-assisted recording of an ultrahigh-order optical orbital angular momentum was published in September 2022 in Optics Express, an international leading journal in the field of optics. In February 2023, the team proposed an innovative scheme for simultaneous detection of single and multiplexed OAM modes and achieved up to ±160-order OAM beam decoupling, which can provide theoretical basis and technical support for the development and application of new generation optical communication technologies.
Professor Yang Chunyong’s team has long been committed to the research of optical wireless communication, hosting and participating in more than 10 projects of the National Science and Technology Support Program, 863 Program and National Natural Science Foundation of China, and many projects of Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation and Science and Technology Program, etc. It has also been granted more than 20 invention patents. In recent years, the team has won numerous awards, including two second-class awards in natural science, one second-class award in scientific and technological progress, one third-class award in technological invention, and two third-class awards in teaching achievements in Hubei Province. Among the team members, there are two advanced individuals of teacher morality in Hubei Province, two young talents of the National People’s Committee, one overseas high-level talent in Hubei Province and two Wuhan talents. The research results of the team have been actively followed in the field of optical communication at home and abroad, and have begun to gain influence.
Edited by Liu Qiong
Reviewed by Pan Wenjun
