Abstract
We experimentally demonstrate the utilization of adaptive optics (AO) to mitigate intra-group power coupling among linearly polarized (LP) modes in a graded-index few-mode fiber (GI FMF). Generally, in this fiber, the coupling between degenerate modes inside a modal group tends to be stronger than between modes belonging to different groups. In our approach, the coupling inside the LP11 group can be represented by a combination of orbital-angular-momentum (OAM) modes, such that reducing power coupling in OAM set tends to indicate the capability to reduce the coupling inside the LP11 group. We employ two output OAM modes l = +1 and l = -1 as resultant linear combinations of degenerate LP11a and LP11b modes inside the LP11 group of a similar to 0.6-km GI FMF. The power coupling is mitigated by shaping the amplitude and phase of the distorted OAM modes. Each OAM mode carries an independent 20-, 40-, or 100-Gbit/s quadrature-phase-shift-keying data stream. We measure the transmission matrix (TM) in the OAM basis within LP11 group, which is a subset of the full LP TM of the FMF-based system. An inverse TM is subsequently implemented before the receiver by a spatial light modulator to mitigate the intramodal-group power coupling. With AO mitigation, the experimental results for l= +1 and l = -1 modes show, respectively, that (i) intra-modal-group crosstalk is reduced by >5.8 dB and >5.6 dB and (ii) near-error-free bit-error-rate performance is achieved with a penalty of similar to 0.6 dB and similar to 3.8 dB, respectively. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America