Optical communications, as the backbone of today’s telecommunications infrastructure, supports voice, video and data transmission through global networks. One critical issue in its research is the challenge of meeting the needs of increasing the data capacity. This talk presents high-speed orbital-angular-momentum (OAM) communications in ring-core optical fibers. First, the basics of OAM and its traditional applications will be introduced. As another newly explored dimension, spatial division multiplexing (SDM) has been demonstrated with the great potential to tremendously increase the data capacity. The building blocks of OAM-based SDM system will be discussed. Next, we will discuss the potential of using OAM modes for spatial multiplexing in a ring fiber. Several types of ring-core optical fibers are presented for OAM modes, including multi ring-core fiber supporting thousands of modes, coupled ring-core fiber with large dispersion, and non-zero dispersion-shifted ring-core fiber to balance dispersion and nonlinearity.

Yang Yue received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering and optics from Nankai University, China, in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, USA, in 2012. He is currently a Professor with the School of Information and Communications Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. He is the founder and current PI of Intelligent Photonic Application Technology Laboratory (iPatLab). Dr. Yue’s current research interest is intelligent photonics, including optical communications, optical perception, and optical chip. He has published ~300 journal papers (including Science) and conference proceedings with >13,000 citations, one book, seven edited books, two book chapters, >70 issued or pending patents, >200 invited presentations (including 1 tutorial, >30 plenary and >80 keynote talks). Dr. Yue is a Fellow of SPIE, a Senior Member of IEEE and Optica. He is also among the Top 2% Scientists List Worldwide by Stanford University. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Access and Frontiers in Physics, Editor Board Member for four other scientific journals, Guest Editor for >10 journal special issues. He also served as Chair or Committee Member for >100 international conferences, Reviewer for >70 prestigious journals.