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

Abstract

We wish to report a typographical error made in the preparation of our manuscript. Specifically, on line 10 of the second paragraph of page 5, we quote values of the parameters that we use to simulate the turbulence. The distances we quote are = z 171.7 1 m and = z 1.538 2 m. The first value is correct, but the second value should read = z 769 2 m. The correct value was used in our laboratory studies, and thus the conclusions of the paper are not modified.We thank Jeffery H Shapiro of MIT for pointing out to us an inconsistency in our published paper, which we subsequently traced to the incorrect value of z 2 quoted in the text. AbstractWe describe a procedure by which a long (≳1 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.

Protecting orbital-angular-momentum photons from decoherence in a turbulent atmosphere

“…Our results agree with the work done [11,17,29] and, from an experimental perspective, from the behavior observed in [30][31][32]. However, unlike these works, we have derived a Kraus representation for the atmospheric tur- bulence channel and studied the behavior of the channel fidelity, not the channel capacity as is more commonly done.…”

Orbital-angular-momentum entanglement in turbulence

“…Other experimental studies not based on the single phase screen approximation include the work by Pors et al [21], where it was shown, using coincidence counts, that the number of entangled modes (the Shannon dimensionality) decreases with increasing scintillation and the recent work by Rodenburg et al [22] where a thick turbulent medium was simulated in the lab with two phase screens and the cross-talk in the communication channel is reduced using an adaptive correction of the turbulence as well as optimization of the channel encoding.…”

Self-healing of quantum entanglement after an obstruction

“…There have also been theoretical suggestions to recover lost entanglement 18 ; however, it is yet to be demonstrated experimentally. In the context of OAM modes, the decay of entanglement has been both predicted 19 and measured 20 for atmospheric turbulence as an environment, with some success in diminishing these effects [21][22][23] .…”