Communication with spatially modulated Light through turbulent Air across Vienna

Understand

The transverse spatial modes of light offer a large state-space with interesting physical properties.

• For exploiting it in future long-distance experiments, spatial modes will have to be transmitted over turbulent free-space links.
• Numerous recent lab-scale experiments have found significant degradation in the mode quality after transmission through simulated turbulence and consecutive coherent detection.
• Here we experimentally analyze the transmission of one prominent class of spatial modes, the orbital-angular momentum (OAM) modes, through 3 km of strong turbulence over the city of Vienna.