Enhanced spin orbit interaction of light in highly confining optical fibers for mode division multiplexing

P. Gregg, P. Kristensen, A. Rubano, S. Golowich, L. Marrucci and S. Ramachandran ()
Additional contact information
P. Gregg: Boston University
P. Kristensen: OFS-Fitel ApS
A. Rubano: Università di Napoli Federico II and CNR-ISASI
S. Golowich: MIT Lincoln Lab
L. Marrucci: Università di Napoli Federico II and CNR-ISASI
S. Ramachandran: Boston University

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Light carries both orbital angular momentum (OAM) and spin angular momentum (SAM), related to wavefront rotation and polarization, respectively. These are usually approximately independent quantities, but they become coupled by light’s spin-orbit interaction (SOI) in certain exotic geometries and at the nanoscale. Here we reveal a manifestation of strong SOI in fibers engineered at the micro-scale and supporting the only known example of propagating light modes with non-integer mean OAM. This enables propagation of a record number (24) of states in a single optical fiber with low cross-talk (purity > 93%), even as tens-of-meters long fibers are bent, twisted or otherwise handled, as fibers are practically deployed. In addition to enabling the investigation of novel SOI effects, these light states represent the first ensemble with which mode count can be potentially arbitrarily scaled to satisfy the exponentially growing demands of high-performance data centers and supercomputers, or telecommunications network nodes.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12401-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-12401-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12401-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().