Demonstration of 20-Gbit/s high-speed Bessel beam encoding/decoding link with adaptive turbulence compensation

By mapping traditional amplitude modulation to spatial modulation and employing adaptive optics compensation technique, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a high-speed Bessel beam encoding/decoding free-space optical link through atmospheric turbulence. The Bessel beam encoding/decoding speed is not limited by the conventional slow switching response of a spatial light modulator (SLM) but is fully determined by the modulation rate of an intensity modulator, which easily supports tens of gigabits per second modulation and resultant encoding/decoding. We use an SLM loaded with a pseudorandom phase mask to emulate atmospheric turbulence in the laboratory environment. An adaptive optics closed loop is used to sense the phase distortion of an extra probe Gaussian beam and then compensate the distorted Bessel beams. A 20-Gbit/s Bessel beam encoding/decoding link with adaptive turbulence compensation is demonstrated in the experiment, showing favorable operation performance.