Proposal to correct aberration and turbulence effects in the propagation of Laguerre-Gaussian modes.

Abstract

Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes are known as carriers of orbital angular momentum (OAM) and, for this reason, such modes have potential applications in optical communications. In this work, we present a study of the effects of aberration and turbulence on LG modes and propose a correction for these effects using a spatial light modulator. The aberrations are introduced by a phase mask obtained through a combination of Zernike polynomials. A scaling factor in the corrective phase mask enables us to optimize the recovery of the transverse structure of the LG beam, opening, to our knowledge, a new investigative avenue on aberration and turbulence mitigation. Numerical simulations and experiments are presented with good agreement.