Abstract
The novel concept of spatio-temporal modulation of Nyquist pulses is introduced, and the resulting wave-packets are termed Nyquist Localized Waves (LWs). Ideal Nyquist LWs belong to the generic family of LW solutions and can propagate indefinitely in unbounded media without attenuation or chromatic dispersion. The possibility of modulating Nyquist LWs for free-space optical (FSO) communication systems is demonstrated using two different modulation techniques. The first technique is on-off keying (OOK) with alternate mark inversion (AMI) coding for 1-bit per symbol transmission, and the second one is 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) for 4-bits per symbol transmission. Aspects related to the performance, detection and generation of the spatio-temporally coupled wave-packets are discussed and future research directions are outlined. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America