Toward High‐Dimensional Encoded Shift‐Keying Optical Links: Intelligent Large‐Scale Coherent Laser Arrays Empower Parallel OAM Mode Recognition

Abstract Coherent laser array (CLA) system is a promising solution for the engineering of multiple beams forming on demand, thereby facilitating long‐distance and multicasting free‐space optical communication links. However, it is challenging to meet the demand of large‐volume transmission capacity in the current CLA architecture. This research transcends such a barrier by pioneering an intelligent large‐scale CLA system for realizing parallel orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes recognition via the convolutional neural network (CNN), thus enabling the development of high‐dimensional shift‐keying communication links. It is demonstrated to exhibit, within the established high‐dimensional communication links, that a total of 256 OAM modes can be classified accurately by resorting to the ResNet‐18, which achieves an ultra‐high precision of 99.69% and an infinitesimal bit error rate (BER) of 3.89 × 10 −4 . More impressively, the high‐dimensional optical links are nearly immune to practical phase errors and free of side‐lobe disturbances. In principle, compared with the traditional CLA system, more OAM modes can be recognized with the proposed system while maintaining superior communication performances. These achievements illustrate that the intelligent algorithm shows great potential in the construction of robust and high‐dimensional CLA‐based OAM shift‐keying optical links.