Abstract
Multi-plane light conversion (MPLC) [1], [2] consists of a series of phase masks separated by a Fourier transform or free-space propagation and is illustrated conceptually in Fig. 1(a). Through this cascaded sequence of phase masks, and the diffraction which occurs between the masks, it is possible to implement arbitrary unitary spatial transformations. That is, any spatial input basis can be converted to any spatial output basis. A common example is to convert an array of Gaussian spots from a single-mode fibre (SMF) array at the input, to a set of fibre modes at the output, where each input Gaussian spot is mapped to an orthogonal mode of the fibre. Such a device can be used for mode-division multiplexing (MDM) in optical telecommunications as multiplexer [3] or as part of other network sub-systems [4], as well as other applications such as high-power beam combining [5]. In these applications, the specific mapping of input modes to output modes is often irrelevant. For MDM, mode coupling along the transmission fibre will quickly redistribute the input light amongst various modes regardless of how it was originally input to the fibre. For beam-combining, the property of interest is often the amount of power which can be concentrated in a given amount of space. In both instances, the primary requirement is the device be as close to lossless as possible, with both low insertion loss (IL) and low mode-dependent loss (MDL), such that no information (for MDM) or power (for beam-combining) is lost in the MPLC process.
© 2017 IEEE
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Nicolas Barré, Bertrand Denolle, Pu Jian, Jean-François Morizur, and Guillaume Labroille
Th2A.7 Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2017
Yunpeng Tang, Zhiqun Yang, Yang Wang, Yaping Liu, and Lin Zhang
W4F.4 Optoelectronics and Communications Conference (OECC) 2021
Nicolas K. Fontaine, Mikael Mazur, Roland Ryf, Lauren Dallachiesa, Haoshuo Chen, David Neilson, Cris Bolle, and Joel Carpenter
We3A.2 European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC) 2022