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. In a proof-of-principle experiment with a controllable turbulence cell, we measure a channel capacity of 4.84 bits per pulse using 34 vector modes through a turbulent channel with a scintillation index of 1.09, and 4.02 bits per pulse using 18 vector modes through even stronger turbulence corresponding to a scintillation index of 1.54.

We study the coherent perfect absorption (CPA) of a chiral structure and derive analytically the CPA condition for transversely isotropic chiral structures in circular polarization bases. The coherent absorption of such a chiral system is generally polarization dependent and can be tuned by the relative phase between the coherent input beams. To demonstrate our theoretical predictions, a chiral metamaterial absorber operating in the terahertz frequency range is optimized. We numerically demonstrate that a coherent absorption of 99.5% can be achieved. Moreover, we show that an optimized CPA chiral structure can be used as an interferometric control of polarization state of the output beams with constant output intensity.

We present a direct tomography protocol that is capable of characterizing the transverse spatial profile of both the polarization and the complex amplitude of fully polarized vector light beams in a single-shot measurement. This protocol entails a sequence of steps: a coherent mode transformation, a weak polarization perturbation, and a polarization-resolved imaging process. The final readout is directly proportional to the complex amplitude profile of the two polarization components of the vector beam. We experimentally demonstrate our direct measurement protocol on a variety of commonly used vector beams, including vector vortex beams and full Poincaré beams. Our method provides the unique capability of acquiring all the information needed to characterize a fully polarized vector beam in a single-shot measurement. Such a real-time complete tomography protocol has the potential to create new opportunities in emerging applications of vector beams as well as fundamental study of complex physical systems with multiple degrees of freedom.

Quantum state tomography is the conventional method used to characterize density matrices for general quantum states. However, the data acquisition time generally scales linearly with the dimension of the Hilbert space, hindering the possibility of dynamic monitoring of a high-dimensional quantum system. Here, we demonstrate a direct tomography protocol to measure density matrices in the spatial domain through the use of a polarizationresolving camera, where the dimension of density matrices can be as large as 580×580 in our experiment. The use of the polarization-resolving camera enables parallel measurements in the position and polarization basis and as a result, the data acquisition time of our protocol does not increase with the dimension of the Hilbert space and is solely determined by the camera exposure time (on the order of 10 milliseconds). Our method is potentially useful for the real-time monitoring of the dynamics of quantum states and paves the way for the development of high-dimensional, time-efficient quantum metrology techniques.

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