Multi-plane Light Conversion

Simulation of the Multi-Plane Light Conversion (MPLC)¹ based on the article by Fontaine et al ². This technology transform a set of Gaussian beams into a compacted Hermite-Gaussian Beams, which can be transformed into Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams³. In telecommunication services, LG beams are used to transfer information over the atmosphere with low losses⁴.

A simplified scheme of the MPLC technology is represented in Figure 1. The simulation uses the wavefront matching algorithm⁵ to calculate the fields and phase masks at each plane. The intensity of the fields at each plane that reflected the fields are shown in Figure 2. The correspondent phase masks are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 1. Simplified scheme representing the MPLC technology.

Figure 2. Plot of the intensity of the fields at the different planes of the MPLC.

Figure 3. Plot of the phase masks at the different planes of the MPLC.

Installation

Use the package manager pip to install MPLC

pip install MPLC

Usage

The package comes with a jupyter notebook called "example.ipynb", to exemplify the usage of the code.

from MPLC.system import System

# Start the system with the default variables
s = System()

# Create Gaussian beams with 5 modes ( 15 beams ) in a triangle position
Gaussian = s.create_Gaussians(num_modes=5, positions="triangle")

# Plot the Gaussians
fig,ax = Gaussian.plot()

# Create Hermite Gaussian beams

Hermite = s.create_HermiteGaussian()

# Set the beams in the system
s.set_fields(Gaussian,Hermite)

# Start the process of compressing the Gaussians into Hermite Gaussian beams
s.start()

# Calculate the matrix with single values of the transfer matrix, the insertion loss and the mode-dependent loss
s, IL, MDL = s.get_couplingMatrix()

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

License

CC 1.0 universal

Author

Joao Abreu

Footnotes

1. J.-F. Morizur, L. Nicholls, P. Jian, S. Armstrong, N. Treps, B. Hage, M. Hsu, W. Bowen, J. Janousek, and H.-A. Bachor. Programmable unitary spatial mode manipulation. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 26(11), 2010. ↩

2. N. K. Fontaine, R. Ryf, H. Chen, D. T. Neilson, K. Kim, and J. Carpenter. Laguerre-gaussian mode sorter. Nature Communications, 10(1865), 2019. ↩

3. L. Allen, M. W. Beijersbergen, R. J. C. Spreeuw, and J. P. Woerdman. Orbital angular momentum of light and the transformation of laguerre-gaussian laser modes. Physical Review A, 45(8185), 1992. ↩

4. J. M. Kahn A. Belmonte. Optimal modes for spatially multiplexed free-space communication in atmospheric turbulence. Optics Express, 29(26), 2021. ↩

5. Y. Sakamaki, T. Saida, T. Hashimoto, and H. Takahashi. New optical waveguide design based on wavefront matching method. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 25(11), 2007. ↩