Compensation-free high-dimensional free-space optical communication using turbulence-resilient vector beams.

Free-space optical communication is a promising means to establish versatile, secure and high-bandwidth communication between mobile nodes for many critical applications. While the spatial modes of light offer a degree of freedom to increase the information capacity of an optical link, atmospheric turbulence can introduce severe distortion to the spatial modes and lead to data degradation. Here, we demonstrate experimentally a vector-beam-based, turbulence-resilient communication protocol, namely spatial polarization differential phase shift keying (SPDPSK), that can reliably transmit high-dimensional information through a turbulent channel without the need of any adaptive optics for beam compensation.