Turbulence-resilient data transmission system utilizing high-order partially coherent Laguerre-Gaussian beams

Increasing capacity and improving accuracy of free-space optical (FSO) communication is an urgent demand. We introduce a high-dimensional data transmission system (with a <1 kHz refresh rate) based on high-order partially coherent Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams, that provides resilience against a turbulent atmosphere. Beyond encoding in the orbital angular momentum (OAM) dimension, we expand the encoding dimensions of partially coherent LG beams by including the radial index and coherence length. This method increases the capacity of data transmission even further. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is introduced to enhance the capability of extracting information features from high-order partially coherent LG beams. We experimentally demonstrated that even in a strong turbulent atmosphere with a temperature difference ΔT=175K, the accuracy of transmitting 128-level grayscale images reached 97.94%. Our communication system therefore, provides a turbulence-resilient solution for high-capacity FSO communication.