At the biennial European conference CLEO (Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics) held in Munich 23-27’th June 2019, the SPOC PhD student Jan Markus Baumann had his work accepted as a prestigious “postdeadline paper”. Postdeadline papers are highly competitive, and only accepts the latest, hottest, and best demonstrated results fresh out of the labs worldwide. The results must be of a ground-breaking or record-breaking nature.
And indeed, Jan Markus has through his PhD work managed to design, fabricate and demonstrate an optical chip capable of merging (multiplex) several beams of light in different states known as modes. His chip is the first to simultaneously multiplex several orbital angular momentum modes (OAM) together in a wavelength transparent manner and suitable for coupling into an optical fibre supporting these OAM modes. He demonstrated the principle by multiplexing 3 OAM-modes simultaneously into an OAM-supporting fibre. Using this type of scheme can allow for increasing the data transmission by simply sending more signals through the same fibre.