Orbital Angular Momentum Waves: Generation, Detection and Emerging Applications

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) has aroused a widespread interest in many fields, especially in telecommunications due to its potential for unleashing new capacity in the severely congested spectrum of commercial communication systems. Beams carrying OAM have a helical phase front and a field strength with a singularity along the axial center, which can be used for information transmission, imaging and particle manipulation. The number of orthogonal OAM modes in a single beam is theoretically infinite and each mode is an element of a complete orthogonal basis that can be employed for multiplexing different signals, thus greatly improving the spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we comprehensively summarize and compare the methods for generation and detection of optical OAM, radio OAM and acoustic OAM. Then, we represent the applications and technical challenges of OAM in communications, including free-space optical communications, optical fiber communications, radio communications and acoustic communications. To complete our survey, we also discuss the state of art of particle manipulation and target imaging with OAM beams

Spectral and energy efficiency of line-of-sight OAM-MIMO communication systems

Not only high spectral efficiency (SE) but also high energy efficiency (EE) are required for future wireless communication systems. Radio orbital angular momentum (OAM) provides a new perspective of mode multiplexing to improve SE. However, there are few studies on the EE performance of OAM mode multiplexing. In this paper, we investigate the SE and EE of a misaligned uniform concentric circle array (UCCA)-based multi-carrier multimode OAM and multiple-input multiple-output (MCMM-OAM-MIMO) system in the line-of-sight (LoS) channel, in which two transceiver architectures implemented by radio frequency (RF) analog synthesis and baseband digital synthesis are considered. The distance and angle of arrival (AoA) estimation are utilized for channel estimation and signal detection, whose training overhead is much less than that of traditional MIMO systems. Simulation results validate that the UCCA-based MCMM-OAM-MI-MO system is superior to conventional MIMO-OFDM system in the EE and SE performances

Linear angular momentum multiplexing-conceptualization and experimental evaluation with antenna arrays

Linear Angular Momentum Multiplexing is a new method for providing highly spectrally efficient short range communication between a transmitter and receiver, where one may move at speed transverse to the propagation. Such applications include rail, vehicle and hyperloop transport systems communicating with fixed infrastructure on the ground. This paper describes how the scientific concept of linear angular momentum multiplexing evolves from orbital angular momentum multiplexing. The essential parameters for implementing this concept are: a long array at least at one of the ends of the link; antenna element radiation characteristics; and the array element spacing relative to the propagation distance. These parameters are also backed by short range measurements carried out at 2.4GHz used to model the Rice fading channel and determine resilience to multipath fading