Encoding and decoding of orbital angular momentum for wireless optical interconnects on chip

Beams carried orbital angular momentum (OAM) are proposed for wireless optical interconnects on chip and a full scheme of encoding and decoding of OAM at single frequency is demonstrated with numerical simulation. With proposed structure, beams with OAM order of -3 to 4 are generated and four orders of them (0 to 3) are used to encode and decode data so that the increased data density of two folds is achieved. According to such results, we believe that if OAM is utilized as an additional dimension in wireless optical interconnects, the data density can be significantly increased since the adopted orders of OAM could be infinite in principle. Moreover, such improvement could be easily applied to the existing architecture without any more complex technology.