Protecting OAM Photons from Decoherence in a Turbulent Atmosphere

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of atmospheric turbulence on orbital angular momentum photons used in quantum communication, proposing an encoding scheme to mitigate decoherence effects and improve transmission fidelity.

Contribution

The study provides a numerical analysis of OAM photon decoherence in turbulence and introduces a novel encoding method to enhance quantum communication robustness.

Findings

Turbulence causes significant errors in OAM photon transmission.

The proposed encoding scheme improves channel fidelity.

Numerical simulations demonstrate potential for reliable quantum communication.

Abstract

One of the most important properties of orbital angular momentum (OAM) of photons is that the Hilbert space required to describe a general quantum state is infinite dimensional. In principle, this could allow for encoding arbitrarily large amounts of quantum information per photon, but in practice, this potential is limited by decoherence and errors. To determine whether photons with OAM are suitable for quantum communication, we numerically simulated their passage through a turbulent atmosphere and the resulting errors. We also proposed an encoding scheme to protect the photons from these errors, and characterized its effectiveness by the channel fidelity.