Recognizing fractional orbital angular momentum using feed forward neural network

Abstract Fractional vortex beam (FVB) possessing helical phase can be applied in the shift-keying communication due to its fractional orbital angular momentum (FOAM) mode, which theoretically allows an infinite increase of the transmitted capacity. However, the discontinuity of spiral phase makes FVB more likely to be disturbed in turbulence environment, and the precise measurement of distorted FOAM modes is crucial for practical FOAM-based communication application. Here, we proposed a FOAM mode recognition method with feedforward neural network (FNN). Employing the diffraction preprocessing of a two-dimensional fork grating, the original optical features of FVBs can be extended along the far-field diffraction order, endowing FNN more feature information and saving calculation time, and enlarging the detection range to conjugate FOAM modes. The simulation results show that the 9-layer FNN can identify FOAM mode with interval of 0.1 with an accuracy of 99.1% under the turbulences of C n 2 = 1 × 10 - 14 m - 2 / 3 and Δ z = 10 m . Furthermore, we experimentally constructed a 102-ary FOAM shift-keying communication link to transmit gray image, and the signals are successfully demodulated by the FNN model with the pixel-error-rate of 0.07160. It is anticipated that the proposed FNN-based FOAM recognition method will break the limitation of precision measurement under turbulence environment in practical FOAM applications.